Disruptive drawing is embedded in the UK's reputation for changing the cultural game. From David Bomberg in the 1940s and David Hockney in the 1960s to modern-day agitators like Tracey Emin and Banksy, British artists have redefined the medium as a conduit for notions of change and rebellion.

By the 1920s, Swiss Dadaist Kurt Schwitters had already ripped up the drawing rulebook with Merzzeichnungen. Schwitters came up with the portmanteau word by colliding Merz (the term he'd invented to define his work) with Zeichnungen (German for drawings) to describe his chaotic collages. In the process, Schwitters showed how drawing could mean much more than just applying an ordered array of pencil lines to paper. Now a drawing could be a jumble of ripped paper, a multi-dimensional gesture or a representation of a political stance.

As Schwitters was reimagining definitions of drawing, artists in the UK had begun to employ liberating approaches to their artwork. Wyndham Lewis's 1912 artwork The Centauress I shows how the founder of the Vorticist movement was stretching traditional concepts of drawing to communicate abstract ideas of depth and motion.

David Bomberg – the painter who would go on to teach Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach – had a brief dalliance with Vorticism before striking out as one of the twentieth century's most important artists. Bomberg built the template for the artist as both a disruptor and a reflector of societal politics.

Three years after Bomberg's death in 1957, the Irish artist Patrick Swift published 'The Bomberg Papers', a collection of notes Bomberg had made throughout his career. Amongst his thoughts on the nature of art, Bomberg averred, '...drawing demands freedom, freedom demands liberty to expand in space – this is progress', adding '...good judgement is through good drawing – from the nervous system to the sensory of the brain it is the combination of eurythmics, euphony and poetry.'

Bomberg's 1942 charcoal artwork Bomb Store is heavy with these thoughts: a darkly poetic rendering using drawing to meditate on the deathly gloom of war. His determination to use art to liberate and expand ushered in a new freedom of art in the UK.

David Hockney was just 23 years old when he came out as gay in 1962. He used his artwork to subtly communicate his sexuality, opening up the conversation around homosexuality in the process. My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean (1962) mixes drawn lines with collage techniques in a visual love letter to his crush at the time, design student Peter Crutch.

Hockney's work went on to encapsulate Schwitters and Bomberg's disruptive notions of drawing as liberation, exploring areas between the traditional drawn line – his pen portraits of Sir Peter Pears (1980) and Moran Caplet (1981), for example – and digital possibilities with his later iPad drawings.

The Friends of the Earth group was founded in San Francisco in 1969, and the British arm of the group came into being two years later. Environmentalist movements had been growing throughout the 1960s, and artists like Hamish Fulton and Andy Goldsworthy were making work that overlapped with themes of conservation.

While Fulton drew lines with his body, walking to create routes that centred attention on nature, Goldsworthy used earthly materials to assemble artworks to highlight environmental issues. Fulton's metal sign, 31 Walks from Water to Water 1971–2010, records his walked journeys and Goldsworthy's Sweet Chestnut Leaf Horn (1987) and Taking A Wall For A Walk (1990) underline the artist's commitment to starting conversations about the importance of the natural world.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, artists and designers like Jamie Reid, Vivienne Westwood and Jo Brocklehurst used their work to mirror the new rebelliousness in British culture epitomised by the punk rock movement.

Ex-art student and Westwood's partner Malcolm McLaren employed art and music to translate counter culture's dissatisfaction with mainstream conservatism. He collaborated with Reid and Westwood to rework 1960s Situationist slogans to speak out against social inequalities, and the band he managed, the Sex Pistols, were punk rock's ideal ambassadors of disorder. The Rock Against Racism organisation (founded in 1976) brought punk and reggae bands together to protest against pervading racial inequalities.

Evoking the anarchic commentary begun by Schwitters' collages earlier in the century, Eddie Chambers' artwork Destruction of the National Front perfectly illustrates the ideology of the partnering of punk disruption with anti-racism, as a swastika dressed in the colours of the Union Jack flag is systematically broken apart and smashed into pieces.

Chambers had formed the BLK Art Group in 1979 and the collective counted the likes of Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce among their number. The group was another powerful force calling for equality, and its members used their work to draw attention to contemporary and historical institutional racism.

In her 1989 drawings, including In Mr Salt's Collection, for example, Lubaina Himid depicted traditional African artefacts that had been stolen and numbered during colonialism.

As with changes in attitude towards the environment and sexuality, using the medium to call for racial equality mirrors David Bomberg's assertion that the liberating and expansive nature of drawing leads to progress, even if that progress is slow.

Other British artists have had a more nebulous approach to using drawing as a reflection of disruptions in attitude. Grayson Perry uses drawing – on pottery, fabric and other surfaces – to comment on society. His 2005 Print For a Politician etching depicts diverse societal groups with contrasting and conflicting ideas.

Tracey Emin was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy Schools in 2011 – a testament to her use of the drawn medium in her work. Scribbled neon light tubing pieces like More Passion from 2010 and I Want My Time With You from 2018, and painterly brushwork in pieces like The End from 2012 show Emin's commitment to using drawing to discuss sexual politics.

Cornelia Parker's practice calls for an end to man-made violence and destruction, and her anti-war sentiments resonate throughout her artworks. Her 'Bullet Drawing' series is made from wire lines drawn using melted-down bullets.

Given his gift for bundling numerous anti-establishment ideals into his work, Banksy is a leader in showing how drawings can tell a disruptive story. His scattershot stencils start as simple sketches and end up anywhere from the side of municipal buildings to the walls of wealthy celebrities.

Sprayed on the exterior wall of the now-defunct prison itself, Escaping Convict at Reading Gaol from 2021 is loaded with meaning.

Given the convict's bedsheet rope is weighted with a typewriter, perhaps it was a reminder of Oscar Wilde's incarceration in the prison in 1885 on charges of gross indecency as Wilde was made to suffer for his sexuality. Maybe it showed support for plans to turn the building into an arts centre and not, as had been proposed, a block of luxury flats. Or was it a protest against prison conditions and overcrowding? Banksy remained quiet on the subject.

What is clear, though, is that the piece is further evidence of the drawn medium's ongoing ability to agitate, disrupt and reflect changing social and political attitudes.

Simon Coates, artist, writer and curator

This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation