Reflecting on personal and collective documentation including digital images and film, text, drawings, and from the collection of sound objects - did I really ‘play’ in the company of fellow collaborators, pieces of cling film, egg trays, a pair of cuttlefish bones and a loop of conger eel, fishing lines to name but a few of our found and fashioned ‘instruments’ to an unsuspecting audience? [Images 1-3] One of the areas for personal research of particular interest in creative collaborations during live events was to experiment with the practice of viewer-participatory involvement. In this instance, experimental drawings through the gesture of inviting the audience to work directly onto prepared, off-set printing plates during the performances. In this fertile, participatory space, the drawings became a sympathetic medium to explore the conventional separation of spectator, potentially dissolving performer, observer and listener into an inclusive audience experience: the drawings in turn, becoming visual scores to play. See Image 6 below and accompanying sound here… Off-set drawing, involves overlapping three layers of paper: the middle layer with its prepared, inked surface rests on top of the lower one (not restricted to paper, for example, textiles). Using a stylus, in this instance, a cocktail stick, the participant then scores virtually ‘invisible’ marks onto this upper section: the visible graphic forming itself via the printing ink in the lower strata of material. To an extent, this susceptible top layer (absorbing pressure marks of the hand), is potentially comparable, as visual artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) observed of his mono-chrome, White Painting –Two Panels 1951, with the light sensitive values of photography (Babington 2007). The presence of chance, its operational qualities in both drawing and printing in this way inform the content of the resulting work. Combined with our audience-collaborators’ curiosity to engage in participatory activities, this immediate, playful and free form process embraces the accident producing marks which contain less self-conscious gestures imbuing drawings with movement and spontaneous composition. Image 4 relates to an individual author, similarly, image 5 to the instruments played depicted in image 3’s fish skeleton and blue plastic ‘vertebrae’ whilst, image 6 shows the outcome of a single plate circulated collectively amongst multiple authors.
Art historian, Lynne Green (2001: 118-121) indicates in her study of the St Ives based, Porthmeor Studios’ painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004), how Barns-Graham integrated similar transfer techniques direct onto canvas in her 1950 painting Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald as both preparatory drawings and finished components. Green noting that Swiss born artist, Paul Klee (1879-1940), first expounded the off-set process: the medium being brought to the attention of British practitioners by, for example, the Jewish Polish painter, Jankel Adler (1895-1949) whom came into contact with Klee in the 1930’s. In introducing trace into the project through off-set drawing, creating new, real time relationships between the act of re-tracing the creative practice of Porthmeor Studios’ practitioners of the past, and the re-presentation of the process in the project’s collaborative live performances became a form of meta-reference and a deeply interesting and personal experience for further research. Clare BABINGTON, Jaklyn. 2007. Exhibition Essay. Robert Rauschenberg 1967-1978. [exhibition catalogue]. Camberra: National Gallery of Australia. Available at: https://nga.gov.au/Rauschenberg/[accessed 23 July 2018]. GREEN, Lynne. 2001 .W. Barns-Graham a studio life. Hampshire, UK: Lund Humphries. Comments are closed.
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time-trace-place
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