What counts as a drawing? This question is more difficult to answer than you might think. A drawing is defined as 'a picture or diagram made with a pencil, pen, or crayon rather than paint' by the Oxford English Dictionary. Tate defines drawing as 'essentially a technique in which images are depicted on a surface by making lines.' The absence of paint, then, and a focus on lines, are essential to drawing. But the boundaries of the medium are porous, and some artists push against them on purpose.

William Tucker

In William Tucker's 1970s series of works called 'Drawings Towards Sculptures', the artist layers materials together to make a surface to draw on. He glues a torn page of newspaper to a sheet of white paper, but he only draws on the newspaper. In these works, he draws sculptural shapes that appear three-dimensional in black ink on the newspaper. They look like twisted folding chairs or easels, made of dark lines that deftly evoke depth. From a distance, it looks almost like thread has been sewn into the paper.

Tucker is an award-winning sculptor who has written extensively about modern art and the practice of modern sculptors. He thinks critically about space and dimensionality. Tucker's drawings intentionally blur the line between drawing and sculpture. By titling the series 'Drawings Towards Sculptures', he articulates these drawings as tools in his artistic process as a sculptor.

Sara Selwood

Sara Selwood also made a series of works in the 1970s that she called drawings. Her series of 'Mountain Drawings' use found materials like sand and dirt to represent a mountainous landscape. They are sculptural, three-dimensional and tactile. The materials she uses to represent mountains also literally are mountains – the earth on the paper is the same earth that makes the mountains. But by calling the works drawings, Selwood makes a specific claim about how we, the viewers, should read them.

Like Tucker, Selwood reminds the viewer how much agency the artist holds in titling works. Selwood made these works at the end of her time as a Fine Arts undergraduate. Although she began her career as an artist, she has since worked as a researcher, gallerist, editor and consultant in the cultural sector. An interest in the environment is a constant thread through her work on and off the easel, which is clearly visible in the earthy naturalist approach to drawing in these two works.

Elizabeth Ogilvie

Elizabeth Ogilvie's series of drawings exploring the flora and fauna of the sea are made on paper she made herself. The wispy, almost transparent texture of the paper evokes the rhythm of the currents, waves and undulations of the ocean. In a way, these works have a sculptural quality, too: the paper itself is a key part of the visual depiction of the sea. These works are all titled Sea Journals and Sea Papers, which communicates a sense of quotidian, regular interaction with the sea and a personal, intimate relationship between artist and viewer.

Ogilvie lives and works near the sea in Fife, Scotland, and her work is guided by an interest in ice and water. She is an environmental artist and is particularly interested in using her art to address the ongoing impact of climate change on seaside or ocean-faring communities. The delicate paper she creates for her drawings points to the fragility of aquatic ecosystems.

Barbara Walker

Barbara Walker's 'Vanishing Point' series reimagines canonical works of art that include Black figures. In this drawing, the figure of the Black servant or attendant is painstakingly rendered in graphite. The white figure has vanished into the paper itself, which is embossed to show her outline in relief. By using the paper as a tool for image-making, Walker has expanded the toolbox of the draughtswoman. Like Ogilvie, Walker uses the paper as much as her pencil when creating these drawings. The two instruments become equal, disrupting the traditional relationship between support and pigment.

The original painting that this drawing references is by Paolo Veronese. All the works in Walker's 'Vanishing Point' series reference so-called Old Master works painted by white artists. She inverts those images to highlight the imbalance of power and representation between the white and Black figures in each painting. By choosing to do so via the medium of drawing, she raises questions about the traditional hierarchy of genre in art, which prioritises painting over all other mediums.

Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean's drawing Disappearance at Sea (Model Modern Art Gallery) is drawn with white chalk on a piece of board painted with blackboard paint. It is erasable and invites a narrative of interaction and impermanence. This work was made especially for Pallant House Gallery's 'Model Modern Art Gallery' project, which constructed doll-house-esque installations of miniature artworks in miniature spaces. This adds to the sense of play or confusion in this work – not only is it playing with medium, but also with scale.

Dean has been described as 'witchy', and her works often engage with themes of nature and magic. She actually works chiefly in film but has made art in various mediums including painting and photography as well as drawing. She was part of the famous 1995 'Young British Artists' exhibition at the Venice Biennale, where her work was displayed alongside Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Fiona Banner and others.

Eliza Goodpasture, Commissioning Editor – Drawings at Art UK

This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation