This article explores the possible relationship between drawing and contemporary art practice in the shift of art into public life. In this shift artists have invented ways of working that situate their work socially, economically and aesthetically in new configurations. How might we rethink drawing as opening up to society? What might drawing reveal about ideas in society? What might drawing become? The article focuses on a drawing research experiments (2017) as part of an accumulation of experimentation that seeks to rethink drawing as an activity that can be shared by more than one person within different experiences of community. Jean Luc Nancy’s 2013 text The Pleasure of Drawing opens up insights into what drawing means as a practice within social experience and what drawing in turn reveals about what we imagine society to be.