Working Drawing – DRAW Space
DRAW Space is an independent artist-run space in Newtown, Sydney that supports artists to engage in new drawing research and to showcase innovative works.
In September 2023, I presented a solo show there, titled WORKING DRAWING, with the
proposition to use the gallery as a hybrid workshop, studio, exhibition and event space where the labour of drawing as practice, pedagogy and field of enquiry was made evident through my daily inhabitation and activations.
Visitors could activate a large sound drawing made in homage to John Cage and watch drawings being produced by various drawing automata, including my version of the 19th-century harmonograph and 21st-century Sensilab Drawbots developed by fellow artist Professor Jon McCormack at Monash University. During the exhibition, I created over 100 original harmonograph drawings on A2 paper that I gifted to visitors who were present during the drawing’s making.
The exhibition’s title paraphrases and adapts from a pivotal 1966 conceptual art project by American artist Mel Bochner ‘Working Drawings and Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art’. My assimilation flips Bochner’s passive noun ‘Drawings’ to the active verb ‘Drawing’ to emphasise consideration of drawing as productive cultural labour and to address the essential ever-present question ‘What can drawing be?’
Visit the comprehensive record of the exhibition at drawspace.org
