spacial drawing workshop with Andrea V Wright
I booked onto the Spatial Drawing Workshop on the 31st October 2019 with Andrea Wright. I had been told about the event by UHArts on the opening night of the Exhibition Extended/Line in the gallery.
It was part of the nationwide Big Draw, as drawing is such an integral part of my practice I knew it was essential to try and get into this workshop. I booked two tickets and invited Lizzie Harnden from my postgraduate fine art cohort along too.
Andrea introduced us to the concept of the spatial drawing through a short discussion about artists who used this in their practice. We looked at the artists, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), Monika Grzymala and Fred Sandback. The examples below were given on the day.
Below you can see how Lizzie and I developed a spatial drawing from black masking tape onto the plastic sheeting. The plastic sheeting was so that the drawings could be moved into the lowercase gallery later on. We went to work making a drawing on the sheet, we made lots of decisions together about placement of the tape and how to develop the piece. We tried things out and took some away again. We made smaller drawings with yarn and tape and added them to the drawing.
We added another sheet of plastic to give it another layer and dimension and a sense of looking through. The orange tape was fun to work with. There was a performative element to making the spatial drawing and we extended the drawing onto the floor of the studio in lines emerging from the base of the plastic and we added a square too.
When the drawings were finished we helped as a group take them through to the UHArts lowercase gallery for installation. We got some experience with art handling and installation in the gallery space.
I managed to get a copy of one of the recommended reading list. I was able to do some further research and was reminded by Isabel Seligman in her book Pushing Paper – contemporary drawing from 1970 to now (2019), that Eva Hesse had indeed made a spatial drawing in 1966, Hang up out of mixed media. Seligman discusses how drawing and sculpture ‘also encroach into time-based practices such as performance and film.’ (Seligman, 2019). She goes on to discuss Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967) and how it was very influential on artist’s practices since, by crossing over so many disciplines and ideas of space, drawing and art-form.
This research has led me to reflecting and thinking about how the line comes off the paper and into another dimension which can be in surprising ways. An example from the book shows Unknown, 1971 by Sol Lewitt, which I hadn’t seen before was of folded paper. This takes me back to my current studio practice of folding. This kind of discovery and re-discovery just goes to indicate how important it is to do these kind of workshops and meeting artists with different experience and knowledge. I want to use this research to develop my drawing and object based practice and also installation to see what will emerge from this extension to my practice.
Untitled, 1971, Sol LeWitt from Seligman, I. (2019) Pushing paper Contemporary drawing from 1970 to now
Seligman, I. (2019) Pushing paper Contemporary drawing from 1970 to now London: Thames & Hudson/The British Library
Tina Culverhouse 