The work in this exhibition was produced during a residency at Drawing Projects UK. This collaborative drawing project acknowledges drawing as a state of becoming. This notion of drawing as a developmental practice that recognizes its experiential nature, its processes and its duration, where sensory experience is more than sight, but also embraces gesture, action, and the ethereal.
The collaborative project utilized dialogues between drawing, action, and performance, using various communication methods, including text, sound, voice and mark making. Motivated by an interest in rules and conventions, both the production of new work and the subsequent exhibition considers how space can be articulated through process-led practices that utilize inventory, written and oral systems to delineate and produce content. The project space we worked in during the residency at DPUK was also the subject of the works by its scale, dimensions, contents and light.
The project’s objective was to explore how drawing could evoke the unseen and reconsider how we see, what we perceive and how physical, volumetric representations of body/site can be understood. This objective enabled two specific questions that centered our work and investigations. These asked how drawing functions both with and within space to establish a instance where nothing turns into something and secondly, by hollowing out what may be overlooked within the project space. To hollow out is to magnify what is discovered as we generate distinctions between formless space and its divisions.
A collection of strategies was devised to address this, and from this body of work we derived Chatroom, Headlanders 1, 2, 3, 4 & Space Wrestling 1, Chatroom 2, & Space Wrestling 2 video works. For Chatroom we collected an inventory of words that described the elements and objects of the project space. We created rules that required us to speak these words phonetically using the inventory in no particular order to create a dialogue. This was recorded and typed into a word document; producing the text works in the gallery space. For the video Chatroom piece we collected words that described characteristics of the room, these included murmur, open, slippage, sharp, fizzy, drop, ruptures, dappled & disperse. Here we attempted to speak the words; however, we prohibited the sounds leaving our mouths by holding our mouths closed with our fingers. This was filmed in the space, documenting the iterations of the words as the light left the space, leaving the sounds in ambiguity and darkness. Space wrestling set rules that created opportunity to play two games in the space. Each game used a single piece of confetti, which was moved by creating gestures that directed air and moved the confetti into the opponent’s goal / basket. Within this, spatial gestures indicative of excess energy for minimal effect come into play, both as means to explore drawn space and contest it limits both of action, aim and value.
Headlanders are a series of performative gestures within a predetermined space, that subsequently leads to a space beyond this. To say liberated gestures, means to contest the sedimentary actions we perform daily and instead to allow automatic and instinctual ones to emerge. In each case, Burgoyne and O’Donnell activated a position, in turn albeit absurdly are subsequently seen from that viewpoint. Four Headlands of sorts are arrived at, north to east to south to west. Subsequently displayed as they are within the framed panelling of the foyer gallery, the Headlanders both orientate and re-configure the space and its meetings of artwork and public. In common with all the works from this project, Headlanders is to literally enter the materiality of drawing, not simple rest on its surface e.g, paper, and like drawing this is both to take a position and be seen from a position in time and space.
