Interview with artists Heather Frise & Anita Matusevics

1. What inspired you to want to draw with others? what led to this impulse of co-creating large scale drawings with community and passerbys?

We met at the birthday picnic of a mutual friend and somehow very quickly agreed that we should one day create some form of drawing school based around perception, creativity and links to nature…

Drawing is something anyone can do. We all have the capacity to make marks with a pencil on paper.

For some reason, many of us decide at some point that we “can’t draw.”

Scientific inquiry is starting to reveal the act of drawing is an important cognitive tool, enhancing memory and critical thinking skills.

We should all draw… things could be better if we all started drawing again.

Sharing a drawing with other people, sharing the experience on a big communal piece of paper, with strangers, with friends, with people passing by or waiting for takeout has been an exercise in rapid prototyping a variety of strategies to see what might happen if we just opened up the drawing to the community around us.

We are super grateful for the enthusiasm that the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence and the people of Scadding Court Community Centre welcomes us to draw with them.

2. How does this practice differ or relate to your ‘regular’ practice and outputs as an artist?

Our own individual drawing practices are quite different, singular, almost hermetic lonely rituals… The ad hoc community drawing sessions gave us a way to explore and experiment and create dialogue around drawing.

3. What do you hope people might take away from a co-drawing session with you?

We hope they find themselves drawing again in some way. Maybe they will come back to draw with us too.
Maybe they will remember that they can draw.

4. When will the next draw with you session be?

We will be moving indoors as the weather cools down… We love the idea of meeting over tea and drawing.

Adding the element of brewing and serving tea to the drawing… teacups and tea leaves

We are still in a very exploratory stage 🙂

The Drawing Forest is on view at PS707 from October 7 to 26, 2025. Now extended to November 2, 2025! 

Artist Bios

Heather Frise is a Toronto-based filmmaker, educator and visual artist. Her work explores ecological imaginaries through drawing, painting, film, video, animation, and sound. Her experimental films and animations have screened internationally and won several awards, including a Genie Award for Bones of the Forest (w/Velcrow Ripper). Her drawings have appeared in exhibitions and publications in Canada and the US. For over seven years, she worked on collaborative, interactive documentary projects at the National Film Board of Canada and was Senior Documentary Development Editor on the Emmy-Award winning, Highrise. She has worked for decades as a teacher, facilitator, and collaborator on participatory community media projects. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from York University and currently teaches drawing and time-based media at OCAD University.

Anita Matusevics is a multidisciplinary designer and artist with a background in architecture. As an artist, her work encompasses large scale graphite drawings, works on paper, animation and binaural soundscapes. Ultimately drawing serves as a way to represent how life is inscribed with histories, that take the form of lines, hints, scars and echoes. Currently, she is a co-founder of Wonder Incorporated, a design practice dedicated to adaptability, resilience and innovation in design, and the Director and founder of the GDV Studio (graphic design and visual communication), launched in 2016, a rural design school within Fleming College and the Haliburton School of Art + Design. She has also held positions of sessional lecturer at the Daniels School of Architecture at the University of Toronto, and former Director of the Global Board of Contemporary Art, centred in Belgium, focused on supporting emerging contemporary art. Anita is one of the original members of Bruce Mau Design, the Canadian studio that led the voice of international graphic design for over 2 decades. Her work there included collaborations with the architects Rem Koolhaas & Frank Gehry, curators Barbara Vanderlinden and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Danish/Canadian industrial designer Niels Bendtsen, the Vitra Design Museum, the Vitra Furniture Company, the MAK museum in Vienna, Maharam textiles in New York and many books and exhibitions. She holds a bachelors degrees in Psychology and Architecture (B.A and B. Arch), and a Masters Degree from the University of Edinburgh (M.Sc Digital Media).