The Drawing Exchange - Adelaide Central School of Art · The Drawing Exchange involves taking some...

The Drawing Exchange A collaborative project of the National Art School, Sydney and Adelaide Central School of Art

Participating artists

Roy Ananda • Liz Bradshaw • Sally Clarke • Daniel Connell Johnnie Dady • Ben Denham • James Dodd • Caroline Durré Joe Frost • Sasha Grbich • Rob Gutteridge • Annelies Jahn Pollyxenia Joannou • Jonathan McBurnie • Wendy Murray Christopher Orchard • Sally Parnis • Margaret Roberts Yve Thompson • Luke Thurgate • Susannah Williams • Zhen

A collaborative project of the National Art School, Sydney and Adelaide Central School of Art

The Drawing Exchange


A word from the curators

From August to September 2017, 22 artists from across Australia converged on Adelaide Central School of Art and the National Art School in Sydney to create new experimental drawings on the walls of both campuses.

The exchange began at Adelaide Central School of Art in 2016. Maryanne was here teaching an intensive unit for our level three students. On a whim, we spoke about the possibility of collaborating on a drawing project as a way of reinforcing the relationship between our schools. Fast forward to 2017, and the project came together with all the reckless abandon of that first conversation. That is the beauty of drawing – its immediacy, agility and humanity provide an ideal framework for exchange.

Luke Thurgate

Public Programs Manager / Lecturer Adelaide Central School of Art

At the National Art School, as artists have come from across the country and conversations have evolved, I have felt a tangible exchange through the essential nature of drawing. I’ve loved the way grubby process and intricate systems, video, performance and lively straightforward observation have come together in a very physical way. Drawings puncture the wall space and float off the surface, infiltrating the fabric of the campuses with both materiality and illusion. As the artists worked together, their laughter and serious silence, as much as the unexpected visual synergies that have bounced around the spaces, was eloquent.

Dr Maryanne Coutts

Head of Drawing National Art School

Government Partners

Supporters

Photography Steven Cavanagh (NAS), Peter Morgan (NAS), Sam Roberts (ACSA)

© National Art School and Adelaide Central School of Art 2017

Image: Wendy Murray and Joe Frost drawing their wall works at the Adelaide Central School of Art

National Art School nas.edu.au

Adelaide Central School of Art acsa.sa.edu.au


Roy Ananda is a South Australian artist, writer and educator. His work celebrates pop-culture, fandom, play, process and the very act of making. Ananda’s solo projects include Slow crawl into infinity at the Samstag Museum of Art (Adelaide) and The Devourer at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. His work has been included in Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), the Australian Drawing Biennial at the Drill Hall Gallery (Canberra) and CACSA Contemporary 2015 at South Australian School of Art Gallery (Adelaide). Ananda is Head of Drawing at Adelaide Central School of Art and is currently undertaking postgraduate research at the University of South Australia.

@roy.ananda

Composition for three orthographic views 2017 graphite, gesso and digital prints on wall, 250 × 400 cm, National Art School

My drawing is an attempt to create a two-dimensional analogue of my sculptural work, Composition for three kit models. This work was an attempt to simultaneously build three kit models, relating to three different pop-culture franchises, in a shared physical space. Similarly, in this drawing, orthographic projections of schematics derived from the Star Wars and Aliens film franchises, as well as the imaginary terrain of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, all compete for pictorial space, much in the same way that these aspects of contemporary folklore complete for a place in my psyche.


Liz Bradshaw is an artist and cultural researcher. Her work is engaged with the historical and epistemological archives of industrialisation and modernity and reworks the ideas, processes and artifacts of these histories as they resurface in contemporary culture transformed by technology and globalisation. She investigates the ways these histories and praxes produce marginalisation, and resist, silence or accommodate the voices of others.

Bradshaw has exhibited and published internationally and her work is held in public and private collections in Sydney, New York and the UK. She has taught art and design at universities and colleges in Australia and England.

lizbradshaw.net @atelier500th

Smalltown Boy, Darlinghurst 2017 ink and acrylic on various surfaces, dimensions variable, National Art School

My work in the Glassroom at National Art School responds to the urban landscape. Rather than an interpretation of the architecture or urban geometry, it is an abstract investigation of place and/or history. Following specific research into the history of both the School site and Darlinghurst generally, as well as visual research into the current environment, I’ve drawn out narratives and visual features as a starting point to consider how we physically inhabit these spaces and make them meaningful.


Much of Sally Clarke’s work has been preoccupied with material and visual significations of domestic space and all that entails. She explores how low-status materials, forms and representations can take their position among very public and dominant discourses including high modernism, the master narratives of landscape painting and contemporary conceptual art, through media such as paint, modeling clay and floor vinyl, as well as formats that range from two-dimensional surfaces to installation. Clarke completed her PhD in Philosophy (Fine Arts) in 2008 and, after fourteen years of working as an academic at the College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales, established AirSpace Projects with artist and designer Brenda Factor. Launched in 2014, AirSpace Projects forms part of her ongoing practice and is housed in a Marrickville warehouse that contains four galleries, a workshop/seminar area and an outdoor residency space.

sallyclarke.com.au

Void 2017 modelling clay on wall, 300 × 300 cm, National Art School and Adelaide Central School of Art

My handmade linear circle formed with pink modelling clay represents what early white settlers regarded as the void of the bush, or outback; the space that exists between our capital cities into which versions of collective Australian identity have been projected. These often romanticised, masculinised narratives continue to be perpetuated by Australia’s dominant urban culture and are represented on the walls of our institutions, in national events and advertising. The making of the circle without guiding devices, emphasises the malleability of both personal and national identity.

At Adelaide Central School of Art, Level 3 Bachelor of Visual Art student, Chelsea Farquhar, made a corresponding version of the drawing (pictured above) based on instruction I provided.


Daniel Connell is an Australian visual artist whose practice combines large scale, public, ephemeral, naturalistic portraiture with a sustained relational practice of one to one advocacy for migrants and people in transition – often the subjects of his portraits. His work investigates the intercultural gaze, hybridity and the limits of art as undocumented daily life acts. Born in Adelaide in 1970, he gained a degree in Spanish, and worked as a support worker in a facility for the homeless while studying visual art. In 2007 Connell moved to India for three years. He has since completed a Masters in Visual Art and is currently a PhD candidate at University of South Australia. He has exhibited in the Kochi Muziris Biennale of Contemporary Art, the Doug Moran Portrait Prize, and created projects for government and major arts festivals.

danielconnell.net @danielconnellartist

Interface 2017 charcoal on wall, 300 × 207 cm, Adelaide Central School of Art

This work is a portrait of a local transport worker. The model was present. The work is an opportunity to acknowledge a person who has recently made Adelaide their home and who, through their work, is an interface between diverse communities.


Johnnie Dady trained in both the United Kingdom and Australia. His work is concerned with the three-dimensional and time-based possibilities of drawing. He lectures in the Sculpture Department and the Drawing Department at Adelaide Central School of Art and has been involved numerous projects, forums and teaching roles in both visual art and design at various institutions. Dady has been exhibiting extensively since 1990 and has produced a range of site-specific projects and collaborative works. Dady has undertaken large-scale public sculpture and design commissions and production design in art films. In 2001, he was granted the Australia Council London Studio Residency and was awarded a mid-career fellowship by Arts South Australia. In 2006, he was granted the Australia Council Rome Studio Residency. His work is represented in public and private collections.

johnniedady.com

Standard Lifts 2017 mixed media on paper live streamed, dimensions variable, British School at Rome, live streamed to the National Art School and Adelaide Central School of Art

Standard Lifts are very small, quick works that attempt – in drawing terms – acts of lifting. The speed and ad hoc choice of things drawn, or shoved upwards, on the paper was less about things and more a desire to generate a dynamic conversation with the ground.


Ben Denham is a visual artist and writer. His work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally. He grew up in the Blue Mountains and studied visual art at Western Sydney University. He works with performance video and makes machines that engage different parts of the body in the process of drawing and writing. In 2002–2003 he spent a year and a half in Mexico with the assistance of the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship. He maintains strong connections to Mexican art and activist culture. His doctoral thesis considered the relationship between art and neuroscience, with a particular focus on gesture and linguistic embodiment. His current interests include evolutionary ecology, microbiology, immune function and Amazonian plant medicine. He is a lecturer in drawing at the National Art School, Sydney.

bendenham.com

Wall Drawing Song No. 1 2017 stepper motors, linear rails, timing belts, microcontrollers, electronics, microphones, audio recorder, headphones, aluminium and ball point pen, dimensions variable, Adelaide Central School of Art

My work for The Drawing Exchange involves taking some of the materials used in automated manufacturing, such as high precision stepper motors and linear rails, and rethinking them in the context of visual art practice. I use these materials to explore the tension between the imprecision of voice controlled drawing and the precision and repeatability that is afforded to us by robotic technologies.


James Dodd makes and presents work in a range of mediums and contexts. Most recently, he has been exploring the potential of simple machines and contraptions as both outcomes and producers of outcomes. These experiments have their foundation in a strong sense of DIY and backyard adaptation. Dodd regularly exhibits across Australia and is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide.

james-dodd.com @jimmydazzla

Robo (Vac) Stadium 2017 modified robot vacuum cleaner, charcoal, pen, and highlighter on paper, dimensions variable, Adelaide Central School of Art

Robo (Vac) Stadium invites the viewer to watch a robotic vacuum cleaner make drawings.


Caroline Durré is an established Melbourne-based artist who writes of her work:

‘I aim to create spaces of visual seduction and psychological entrapment. Devices from the seventeenth century, the Baroque formal garden and its vegetative arabesques, the bastionated polygonal fortification, quadratura (ceiling painting of fictive architecture) and anamorphic perspective, are some of my starting points. Such apparently disparate forms are linked in that they each manipulate the perception of space in order to entice and disorient the viewer.’

Until recently Durré was a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Art Design & Architecture, Monash University, where she finished her PhD in 2008. She has completed several large-scale wall paintings, the most recent one being sixteen metres long by four metres high for the City of Yarra Council Offices, Melbourne.

carolinedurre.com

Anamorphic entities 2017 fluorescent acrylic paint on wall, 2.5 × 7.5 m, National Art School

In my work for The Drawing Exchange, I have created painted shapes that expand from the wall into three-dimensional space, their fluorescent colours calculated to affront the senses. The shapes are distorted when viewed straight on, but from other standpoints they appear regular. These strange forms, dancing and dazzling, might prompt questions about the reliability of perception. The search for optical enigma is still alive in the age of virtual reality.


Joe Frost is a painter-drawer whose development spans 25 years. He studied at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales from 1992 to 1995, returning to complete a Master of Fine Art in 2002. His exhibiting debut was in a 1999 group show, Cityscapes, at Level Gallery, Newtown, and he continued to exhibit urban landscapes, still-lifes and occasional portraits in yearly shows at Legge Gallery, then Watters Gallery throughout the 2000s. Recently the human figure has emerged as a subject in his paintings and drawings. Working through a process that ranges between in-situ observation and studio improvisation, his work is characterised by an exploratory approach to pictorial form and expresses a complex sense of identification with place. He won the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing in 2007. He is represented by Watters Gallery, Sydney, and has published more than thirty reviews, catalogue essays and articles on art. He is a lecturer in drawing at the National Art School, Sydney.

Untitled 2017 acrylic paint on wall, 350 × 610 cm, Adelaide Central School of Art

Recently I have been making studies of the human head. The wall I have been offered in Adelaide will give me a large surface on which to find variations on this theme but the wall is bisected by a centrally-located fireplace. I cannot say how this will influence my drawing, but look forward to commencing work.


Sasha Grbich is an artist, writer and lecturer who works with sculpture, installation, sound and video. An avid collector of strange ‘things’, found footage, sounds and stories; she is fascinated by the ways art interacts with everyday life. Grbich creates art experiences that explore how art performs with audience and in local environments. She lectures at Adelaide Central School of Art and is the School’s Bachelor of Visual Art and Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) Coordinator. In 2015 she completed postgraduate research at University of South Australia, examining the operation of art making practice as a series of ‘performative encounters’. In 2017 Grbich was awarded the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship to continue her postgraduate studies.

sashagrbich.com

Learning the language of sleep (drawing iteration) 2017 mixed media, dimensions variable, National Art School

For this project I started with a previously recorded sound work in which I attempted to learn the language spoken by sleep talkers. This drawing iteration translates that strange language into marks, exploring the tactile and the involuntary by privileging tremor and touch.


Rob Gutteridge is an Adelaide based artist and educator. He has a Diploma of Fine Art (Painting), Graduate Diploma of Adult Education, and Graduate Diploma of Visual Arts. Gutteridge has received various scholarships, allowing him to spend time at institutions including the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. He was formerly the Head of Drawing and Printmaking at Adelaide Central School of Art, where he currently lectures. He is also the director of the Rob Gutteridge School of Classical Realism in Adelaide and an elected Associate Member of the Society of Graphic Fine Art, London. He was selected for the 2011 Malaysia/Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia, and in 2012 was artist in residence at Redgate Gallery, Beijing, China. His works are in the public collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia, South Australian Museum of Natural History, Artbank and numerous international private collections.

rgcr.com.au @rob.gutteridge

Untitled (in response to Luke Thurgate) 2017 charcoal and chalk pastel on wall, 300 × 272 cm, Adelaide Central School of Art

Drawing questions appearance as it uncovers, recovers, and discovers. As Luke covers, I uncover, in my case through anatomy drawing. Anatomy, as a branch of science, and anatomical drawing as a specialised drawing practice, share some common purposes in their ability to examine and display structures giving rise to visual appearance.


Annelies Jahn is a Sydney-based artist who comes out of a thirty-five year professional career in graphic design and publishing, both in Sydney and London. In 2016, she completed a Master of Fine Art at the National Art School. Her work has a minimalist sensibility, utilising non-traditional industrial and found materials such as acrylic, metal, Styrofoam, Mylar and cardboard. She works with installation, intervention, wall-drawing, assemblage, painting, photography and video.

This project continues her investigation of ideas of space, relationship and temporality, as it is experienced through things or objects, and space or place. The contingency of these perceptions is observed via the agency of measure to become the process of art making.

instagram.com/anneliesjahn

5 x 9 #2.1 / variation 2017 pins and string, 230 × 325 cm, National Art School

The aim for this project is to present a work that can adapt to a general space, to set up systems for a process driven work and a manner of making that uses personal units of measure with an element of chance, similar to the intention of the works of Sol LeWitt. The continuous line drawing uses string held by pins over a loose grid. The resulting drawing is subtle with the line strength dependent on both the viewing point and changing light.


Pollyxenia Joannou has received many awards including the Redland Art Prize, the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship and the Dyason Bequest from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She has lived in London for many years and been awarded residencies in Italy (the Australia Council for the Arts), Paris (the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Art School), DRAW International, France, Glasgow and the Gunnery Studio, Sydney. She holds an MA from Central Saint Martins in London and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from University of New South Wales. She is represented in collections of the Art Gallery of NSW, Artbank, University of Sydney, Redland Art Gallery and private collections throughout Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Europe and the United Kingdom. She currently works and lives in Sydney and lectures in drawing at the National Art School.

pollyxenia.com

Dissolve 2017 pigment on wall, 300 × 5 cm, National Art School

My work for The Drawing Exchange is based on the notion of dissolving and/or vanishing. Placing a thin vertical line that stretches from the floor and gradually disintegrates or dissolves towards the ceiling level I aim to generate an ascension, until it becomes one with the given space or surface. This vertical line is rubbed into the wall with pigment and becomes imbedded into the support.


Jonathan McBurnie is Queensland-based artist whose work is a collision of high culture and trash iconography. Incorporating referents from art, comics, film and other sources, McBurnie’s work reconfigures his own life story with fictional histories of superheroes and filmic red-herrings. On a technical level, McBurnie’s work draws equally from inked comic book illustration, printmaking and en plein air landscape, remixed and reconfigured through collage, which forms a composition for finished works. Each work is therefore set in a completely unreal place; even the landscape has been collided, and rendered fantastic. At once earnest and satirical, McBurnie’s drawings work at different registers, changing depending upon their hang and the conversation between images, varying from deeply personal to cheeky and irreverent. McBurnie has recently completed his postgraduate study at the Sydney College of the Arts, focusing upon drawing, mounting a fake retrospective of this four-year period, exhibiting some 800 works.

jonathanmcburnie.com @king_of_nails

Kill Me Now Because I Am A Wanker 2017 ink on wall, 2.5 × 7.5 m, National Art School

This work is an extension of my fascination with landscape, a tradition I like to subvert by creating wholly fantastic places, assembled through collage ‘sketches’ before their execution. These blasted landscapes speak to the endless possibilities of fractals, a macro/micro view of the composition of the body, the world and the cosmos, and a play on imaginary worlds of science fiction film, comics and animation.


Wendy Murray is a Sydney-based artist and art educator. Her work is informed by political poster histories, street art and graffiti, and the dérive, or unplanned journey. Through her projects, Murray seeks to establish crossovers and new relationships between community and institutions. She currently lectures in printmaking at the National Art School and is a Research Assistant in Geography and Urban Studies at Western Sydney University.

@drawingacrowd wendymurray.com.au

The Polite End of Town? 2017 ink and gouache on museum board, printed map, and ink on wall, 350 × 980 cm, Adelaide Central School of Art

Over seven days, I attempted to document the experience of Hindley Street in Adelaide, through the development of a series of postcard-sized drawings. These drawings reflect a visual engagement with the ordinary and provide the notations for my gallery wall installation – a translated landscape.


Christopher Orchard is one of the leading exponents of the drawn image in Australia and is well recognised by his peers in Australia, Europe and the United States. He is the 2017 South Australian Living Artists Festival Feature Artist and the subject of an accompanying monograph published through Wakefield Press. Orchard has lectured in the Drawing Department at Adelaide Central School of Art for over three decades, and has given masterclasses and workshops at institutions around Australia. He has an extensive exhibition history and has work held in major collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, Government House (SA), the British Petroleum Collection (London), Kedumba Drawing Collection (NSW), FH Fauldings and numerous private collections. Orchard is represented in Australia by BMGArt, Adelaide, and Wagner Gallery, Sydney. He is represented internationally by Stephen Rosenberg Fine Art, New York.

corchard.com.au

Untitled 2017 charcoal on wall, 350 × 720 cm, Adelaide Central School of Art

I determined to make a work of drawing that would encompass an entire wall in Adelaide Central Gallery. As I approached the pristine wall I knew in an instant that I wanted to fracture/puncture its integrity … So I did.


Sally Parnis graduated from Adelaide Central School of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons) in 2010. Since then she has been involved in a number of solo and group exhibitions, in particular at Hill Smith Gallery, Praxis Art Space, Adelaide Central Gallery and both The Women’s and Children’s and Flinders Medical Centre Arts in Health. Parnis has completed residencies at St Peters College, St Ignatius College, Pt Augusta Yarta Putli Art Centre and Signal Point Gallery, Goolwa. Parnis’s work has been short listed in a number of art prizes including the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the Fleurieu Water and Environment Prize, the Adelaide Parklands Art Prize, the SALA Contemporary Art Prize and the Emma Hack Art Prize.

Parnis maintains a regular drawing practice which she shares via her blog ‘Message in a bottle’:

http://sallyparnisdrawings.wordpress.com

Untitled 2017 animated digital drawing, dimensions variable, Adelaide Central School of Art

The drawings on one screen jump into the landscape on the other: multiplying, receding, disappearing and reappearing as the landscape gradually changes, making and remaking itself by an unseen hand.


Margaret Roberts uses drawing-installation to construct relationships between the abstract space of artwork and the actual space of their locations. This is partly so that, by valuing its location sufficiently to make it a partner in the work, artworks can act as a model for the way audiences value their own environment. This practice came from a sculpture background, an inability to make spatially autonomous work and a decision to treat the place in which a work is to be made as a partner in its outcome. A recent residency in Rome, led to her current interest in the method that architect Francesco Borromini is thought to have used in the 17th century, to construct the shape of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza using triangles and circles. This interest led to wall drawings that give location an active role by providing hanging rulers for audiences to make the drawings’ circles.

Margaret Roberts is a lecturer in drawing at the National Art School, Sydney.

margaretroberts.org

Triangle & Circle 3A 2017 jarrah floorboard, graphite, location, 300 × 234 cm, Adelaide Central School of Art

Triangle & Circle 3 is a summary of Borromini’s method. It is enlarged for The Drawing Exchange in Adelaide so that audiences make the curve with a ruler made from the same material as the neighbouring floorboards, an enlargement that leaves only a remnant of the triangle and one ruler visible on the existing wall.


Yve Thompson worked as a graphic designer in an architecture and urban design environment before moving from the Blue Mountains in New South Wales to the McLaren Vale area of South Australia in 1998. Following the move, she shifted from a design practice to a one focussed on visual arts. Thompson completed a Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons) at Adelaide Central School of Art where she now lectures. Her varying research interests include landscape painting, colour field abstraction and botanical illustration. Thompson works out of Central Studios and is represented in South Australia by BMG Gallery, Adelaide.

Untitled 2017 graphite on wall, 300 × 272 cm, Adelaide Central School of Art

Drawing is magic – universal and intuitive – marks on a surface. I investigate a simple repeated line using slight variations to evoke a sense of space.


Luke Thurgate is an artist and educator based in Adelaide. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Newcastle and currently lectures in the Drawing Department at Adelaide Central School of Art. Thurgate has participated in numerous exhibitions, residencies and public programs throughout Australia. He was selected for SafARI in 2008 and has been a finalist in the Redlands Westpac Art Prize, the Prospect Portrait Prize and the Whyalla Art Prize. In 2017, he was a guest lecturer for Drawing Week at the National Art School, Sydney, and was also the inaugural artist-in-residence for the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists’ Congress at the Adelaide Convention Centre.

lukethurgate.com @luke_thurgate

Monster (in response to Rob Gutteridge) 2017 charcoal on wall, 300 × 272 cm, Adelaide Central School of Art

This work is a collaboration with artist Rob Gutteridge. Two drawn figures face off, mirroring each other’s pose and gesture. Mine looms ambiguously on the wall, intentionally monstrous but dumb. Rob’s figure, cool and precise, is its anatomical twin reflection. Both works are informed by representational modes of drawing, a nod to the context of the art school wall.


Susannah Williams is a Melbourne-based artist who graduated from the National Art School in 2008, where she majored in drawing. She has contributed numerous installations and wall works for artist-run initiatives, festivals, prizes and artist residencies across Australia and internationally. Later this year, Williams commences a Master of Fine Art (Research) at the Victorian College of the Arts, focusing on the visual nature of sound. Since 2013, Williams has worked in collaboration as Artist-in-Transit with Ro Murray, and with Warren Armstrong. These collaborations have stretched her practice across disciplines of new media, architecture, sculpture, installation, virtual reality and sound. For this work she was awarded, with Warren Armstrong, the Casula Powerhouse’s Paramor Prize for Art and Innovation 2017, as well as an Arts and Culture Grant from Inner West Council, Sydney. Williams was a recipient of an ArtStart Grant in 2010 from the Australian Council for the Arts, and in 2014, was awarded a residency with the Banff Centre for Creativity, Canada.

susannahwilliams.com

Sound Chart II 2017 virtual reality drawing in HTC Vive and Tilt Brush, 400 × 250 × 200 cm, National Art School. Technical support by Warren Armstrong

Sound Chart was developed live to site, using the HTC Vive and Tilt Brush programme. For me VR technology presents an opportunity to explore dimensions of space and sound in drawing. Audiences are invited to walk through the drawing, navigating the drawn marks and finding embedded sounds.


Zhen is a graduate of Monash University and is currently based in Melbourne. She is a performance drawer who explores perceptual drawing, the archival process of storing visual information in human memory and aspects of photographic and digital technology. Her work questions our perceptions of experience, time, place, self, but most fundamentally, of memory. The relationships between these elements are expressed through charcoal, pencil and pen drawings, video recordings of her drawing processes and interactive tablet animations. Fundamental to her practice is the idea that perceptual drawing can be best described as the process of drawing from an outwardly perceived phenomena, not only drawing the subject but also the changes in perception that arise through this act of drawing.

zhenart.net @zhenart

Drawing with a 1 year old – challenge accepted 2017 digital archive of livestreamed performance drawing, charcoal on paper, dimensions variable, National Art School and Adelaide Central School of Art. Featuring Kei Arai

Through this project, I archive the challenges of continuing a drawing practice in the context of being a new mother. Using charcoal on a wall-sized drawing, I capture my home studio as well as my rambunctious baby girl. I live streamed my performance drawing and then created a stop motion animation from the footage.

Joanna Kitto Gestural, loose, controlled, fixed. Drawing is the most primal form of human expression. From an early age children spontaneously engage in mark making, using whatever they can find: a crayon, a pencil, any form of matter that will leave an impression on another. Pre-dating written communication, the act of drawing is a way of teasing apart the world and piecing it back together, line by line, mark by mark.

The artists in The Drawing Exchange take on drawing in all its forms. In a collaboration between the Adelaide Central School of Art and the National Art School in Sydney, twenty-two artists from across Australia participate in the act of drawing. From loose sketch to mechanised rendering, made on a screen or using the body, this drawing is experimental, performative and collaborative.

The multiplicity of approaches to The Drawing Exchange demonstrates that drawing is not a singularly defined entity: it is an activity continuously in flux, adapting to new forms, emerging technologies and conceptual attitudes. For these artists, drawing is a process rather than a medium, the space between conception and the end-point their concern.

Gillian Lavery When I think about drawing I think about the verb, as the act of thinking through ideas, teasing them out, rearranging them, finding new lines of enquiry to explore. The drawing itself (as a noun) is the trace of a process of exploration. For some artists these traces are a springboard for new ideas. They are stepping stones along a lifetime of art practice.

For process-based artists the exhibition space is entered – starting point, previous work, and a selection of materials in hand (along with the question, ‘What happens if I …?’). Through drawing as a form of thinking, these elements bounce off each other and the artist, their exchange recorded. Drawing is both tool and trace.

As do scientists, the artists of The Drawing Exchange use hypothesis and experimentation. Propositions allow for exploration into unknown fields without knowing the end point, or even when we will get there. Extending logics beyond their initial intention has brought about many discoveries – and many more failures – all of which are essential to learning.

These experiments are also performative: the task of making shares the stage with the outcome. Through their performances, the artists engage the body – their bodies – to varying degrees. For those working on a large scale, directly on the wall, the artists’ body is employed as a medium through which to make their mark. Others have removed the body entirely, bringing in machines to deliver their result.

At NAS traces of the body are found in streaks of ink and paint, finger smudges, pinched clay and plasticine, and the creation of a drawing streamed live. Then you as the viewer are invited to step into a virtual drawing created in situ by the artist. On approach all that exists is a tape-marked square on the floor, but with the addition of virtual reality glasses the world of the drawing is revealed.

What of multiple bodies? Collaboration and exchange has been invited across many levels: between artist and wall, artist and artist, artist and audience, school and school, city and city.

The gallery is transformed into a site of interaction and engagement. While the artists are working there is a palpable energy that ebbs and flows: conversations across spaces between artists, conversations with the steady trickle of viewers and students, and then moments of deep concentration (often signalled with headphones).

I think about this process as a feedback loop being stretched and lengthened, often in unexpected ways or at unanticipated points. As the artist you are opening your studio to the viewer. It is a distracting, nourishing, and often rewarding act of generosity as you make those first tentative marks on the blank wall, a nascent and precious time of the process. The value of this approach to art practice, especially in educational spaces, provides a generative and rich ground upon which to think about drawing.


What I think about when I think about drawing

An exchange between Joanna Kitto and Gillian Lavery

2017

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