SPLACE: performative drawing - co-creating third sites
Burgoyne, Greig (2017) SPLACE: performative drawing - co-creating third sites. In: Drawing Conversations 2, 9 December 2017, University of Coventry, UK.
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This paper aims to explore the notion of performative drawing less as an arena of witnessing the drawer but more a space for co-creation. Third space is to see the removal of the distancing commonly produced between site, viewer and drawing performance.
This presentation takes two contrasting site-specific drawing performances that explore how and what can be garnered when gestures of the body meet ‘gestures’ by/of public space in doing, so it is to propose that performative drawing is with space and audience.
Count/walk/follow/lost in June 2017 commissioned for Fringe Arts Bath 2017 as part of ‘Embodied cartographies’ and Island Workout in September 2017 commissioned for Coastal Currents Arts Festival Hastings.
The first for a graveyard at Walcott Chapel, Bath, explores the performed gestures of linearity & duration in a drawing balancing-act between contingency and fate. A grave plot is measured and marked out in masking tape on the path to the chapel. When we measure in drawing we contain and perhaps grasp that space or site so to speak in representing it.
Here drawing starts as processed gestures, namely walking as measurement of the dimensions of a grave through counting out loud the numbers of paces taken and directions taken to do that. Simultaneously this is recorded/videoed on a mobile phone then played back as instructions to follow from the original starting point/grave that has been marked out on the path that takes you into the chapel. The outcome sees the drawer wander aimlessly in and around the cemetery lost and beyond the initial space that he paradoxically sought to re-affirm. In reiterating that space and site, and its invisible audience that prompted the performance the drawer can’t find it and strays beyond the grave never able to find it again.
The 2nd performance Island Workout was conceived for the roof of a public toilet on a seafront. In this work, the automatic gestures are those movements that I’m seeking to follow for as long as I can at their various speeds and durations everything that moves, be it sluggishly following a distant tanker on the horizon; sprinting after cars as they pass; haphazardly chasing gliding gulls or robotically following alongside walkers as they stroll along the seafront. In all cases the drawer never leaves the enclosed, elevated space. This site is an in-between space; buffeted by the sea to which it looks out toward and passed by a constant flux of people and traffic that goes to and fro behind it.
Through these two connected, yet contrasting works, Burgoyne will seek to explore what this third space is; expand upon how it came about; propose what kind of unity between audience and drawer results; contest what it this third space may be indicative of, both in terms of temporal space and its implications for drawing.
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