Among the world’s most interesting and creative duos-- Lennon and McCartney, Laurel and Hardy, Gilbert and George-- I could pretty much guarantee that none have honed their joint talents during an all night game of Exquisite corpse. Fortunately, for fans of the more crude and naughty side of illustration, this is exactly how the London duo, Dirty Drawers, mutated into the beautiful mess they are today.

The two are stylistically different illustrators: Rowenna Harrison brings her more refined drawing style to the table, while Laura Gill messes it all up with her comic grotesqueness. Their art comes across as a series of cheeky, secret images that pay homage to a quainter Great Britain where freak shows, taxidermy, dandies, peep shows, and the macabre made people chuckle. Their ramshackle little collections of python-esque imagery won’t be found behind Perspex or mounted on walls. Its home is not the standard gallery space: Dirty Drawers take advantage of this by making the spaces in which they exhibit a part of their work, rather than a backdrop. psychoPEDIA spoke with the two artists to find out how their offbeat art evolved:

Was there life before Exquisite corpses?
LG: Interestingly, we didn’t meet over that famous game. I was involved in an exhibition where I was displaying in a little room that had a little off-shoot room that was no use except the dirty wash basin. I had a drawing of some naked tattoo ladies that I hadn’t finished, and I got Rowenna in as an experiment to finish it off. She did it so well, we decided it would be fun to go play Consequences and see where it took us.

Had you seen each other’s work even before that exhibition?
RH: I couldn’t draw actually. We knew each other, but we didn’t know each other’s work before we dove into it.
LG: We didn’t dream of how much we would like it.
RH: By that point, I was pissed off with drawing, I had left college, and since then, hadn’t really felt like I wanted to do anything illustration-based. So Laura re-kindled the fun of it.

Do you have a particular process of working other than exquisite corpses?
LG: We don’t play that anymore. We have to keep inventing new ways of working. There’s only so many times we can use one method before it all starts to look the same.
RH: An idea or sketch can change hands a lot before it gets to what it is.

Are there things you have to throw away that just don’t work?
LG: We do tend to have battles.
RH: She will draw something grotesque, and I will add a nice frilly dress body. Or I will draw a pretty woman’s face, and she will draw some big caterpillar body to try and spite me. Dirty Drawers has the same kind of feeling and freedom as when you were a kid and used to draw funny things on people’s faces in newspapers.

With your exhibitions depending entirely on the space in which you exhibit, isn’t it a rush to get things done?
LG: It's always off-the-cuff. We feel that when people come and look around, that is part of the piece–- For those people to come in and see it, at that place and that time. But what we do is always a reaction to what the place is like or what the people have set for us.

And how did this philosophy work at your “IN OUTSIDE” show at the Macbeth?
RH: We did a show awhile back that was about imaginary friends and how you blame certain things on them. The drawings that came out were a bit weird, but we would say it wasn’t Laura or me– Dirty Drawers did that. We had a series of characters with texts, and our favorite became a guy named Jan.
LG: He granted us no limitations. We blamed everything on Jan.
RH: He is the naughty spirit that is Dirty Drawers-- its always his fault, not ours. He even got his own MySpace account and sent people naughty things.

How did that translate to the exhibit?
RH: We created Jan’s hut within the space. One of the ideas behind this was, “Is it before or after the present?” Could it have been set in a city in the future, all bulldozed then redeveloped into the countryside? Then we got stuck on the idea that it should be a little shed in the countryside, which is home to a hermit, Jan.
LG: Perhaps it references back to our roots.
RH: Jan came in as an outsider and helped us on with ideas. He is someone living there who is definitely outside of our civilization. And this is a little museum of our civilization and culture.

Do you feel that displaying in a pub may mean your work isn’t taken seriously?
RH: We did have to think a lot more about what people would actually pay attention to. If we just put up some pictures, people will just walk past them. But we can make them a part of it– [put them] in it. So, everyone is playing out their own roles in the piece.

~Kevin Soar