Drawing ‘Out’, ‘From’, ‘With’ – Lips Become The Surface

Artist Jade Montserrat and I were invited to engage in a performative workshop with Block Universe, a performance based arts organisation for their first digital festival.

 

Drawing ‘Out’, ‘From’, ‘With’ – Lips Become The Surface expanded upon Drawing as Contagion, a chapter included in forthcoming publication A Companion Guide to Contemporary Drawing, eds Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum (2020), written by Jade, and the work Jade and I were beginning to engage in with Constellations: Care & Resistance. Considering the inextricable link between drawing, writing and performance.

 

The event saw Jade responding to the text that I read aloud, following with audience engagement in drawing practice. The audience were invited to draw onto a range of surfaces available to them at home and included digital surfaces, performance was also encouraged by positioning the use of the lips and mind as a surface that could function as a medium to translate text into imaginary, or word-based, drawing.

 

A collective digital drawing was created by the participating audience, recording their insights into the practice of drawing, using the whiteboard function of Zoom that archived the experience.