Drawing – both her own and other people’s – is a key part of Kovats’ practice. In 2007, she wrote The Drawing Book (Black Dog, 2007), and she has long been interested in what drawing can do. For her exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery she has made a new book. Believing that drawing is a mechanism for exploration as much as a tool for representation, Kovats brings together in the book drawings by map-makers, writers, shipbuilders, whalers, soldiers, sailors, artists, archaeologists, cartographers, scientists, uranographers, engineers and dreamers – a diverse selection united by the sense that in making the drawing they were looking for something. A selection of Kovats; own drawing and writing anchors the book which attempts to construct, in the artist’s words, ‘a portolan, a chart drawn at sea to guide a sailor from one safe harbour to the next.’