"Syl Cheney-Coker" Drawing

My practice uses portraiture to question who is seen or overlooked, as well as whose histories are remembered and valued. I work in ballpoint pen on antique texts and maps, placing faces and bodies onto surfaces already marked by history, ideology and authority. My drawings move between the personal and the political, exploring identity, representation and belonging alongside more intimate experiences of grief, mental health and vulnerability. Across the work, I am interested in how a portrait can speak to both the world around a person and the private realities we live with.

A central part of my work is addressing historic omissions within traditional British portraiture. I often depict figures from ethnically diverse backgrounds, questioning who has been granted visibility within cultural memory and who has been excluded. Born in Southeast London and informed by my Sierra Leonean-Lebanese heritage, my work considers what it means to navigate Britishness through more than one cultural lens.

My drawings often move between realism and the quasi-surreal. Some works engage with colonial histories, heritage and the visibility of marginalised figures, while others turn inward towards grief, anxiety, vulnerability and the attempt to rebuild meaning after loss. These concerns are connected by a wider interest in what it means to live with displacement, whether cultural, psychological or emotional.

Drawing directly onto antique texts and maps allows me to work with historical ephemera as both material and subject. Their printed language, cartography and systems of classification carry the values and assumptions of their time. By placing the portrait within these surfaces, I bring the figure into confrontation with the structures that have shaped societal visibility. The work questions authority, challenges ethnocentricities and creates space for histories and identities that have often been obscured.

Ballpoint pen is central to my practice. Working in black and blue, I build layers of tone through delicate, precise and repeated mark-making. The everyday nature of the pen contrasts with the labour-intensive process, allowing me to approach drawing as an intimate and enduring form of expression in a culture increasingly shaped by speed and digital reproduction.

Whether addressing heritage, race, grief, masculinity, mental health or belonging, my drawings are concerned with visibility: who is seen, how they are seen, and what remains hidden beneath the surface.