Sunday 15 March 2015

Drafting meeting

Next weekend I am going to be participating in Drafting, an exploratory, two day performance event, 20th - 21st March, 2015 in the gallery space at Baltic 39. This project brings together eighteen artists to investigate a range of approaches to drawing through performance, and to drawing as a performative process.

Today a group of us met up to work through some practical matters. We finalised the design and contents of the brochure, and over the next few days they are being printed by risograph.




We also visited the gallery that will be our home for the 2 days, and discussed our plans.

There is plenty that still needs to be done, but we will get there!

Some thoughts on drafting...

A draft is generally understood as the preliminary outline of an idea - a text or image that by its nature is malleable and subject to change through a series of adjustments.

Where drawing is concerned the term implies developmental phases, including aspects of abstraction in the making of plans, diagrams, signs and notations.

Perhaps, the term can even, by extension, be used to articulate ideas of encoded behaviours; it signals how a sense of emergence hovers around the act and concept of drawing, the potential for gaining access to imagined ideas or extracting directly from actual situations; it suggests multiple ways that through drawing it is possible to create physical evidence of both external and embodied circumstances.



The aim of Drafting is to create an environment where consideration of the potential imbedded in the act of drawing as well as communication through drawing can encourage reflection on ideas such as:

  • how the body can be both receptive to and implicated in the sensorial handling of materials, marking time through ritualistic engagement. 
  • how actions developed as drawings can often be understood as acts of territorialisation, involving issues of duration and the perceptible expenditure of energy 
  • How the ritualised quality of an artist’s actions might be considered irrelevant as a performative strategy and replaced by methodologies that use wider cultural contexts as material for both drawing and performance. 
  • How it might be possible to achieve 'not performing' - with all the slippage and inconsistency which that entails. 

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