Performance Drawing

About this event

When does a drawing turn into a performance? Is the act of drawing in itself a performative process, whether a viewer is present or not?" Hosted by Dr Jacek Ludwig Scarso (Reader in Art & Performance), this event features artists and researchers Dr Carali McCall and Claire Zakiewicz. It takes inspiration from the recent publication Performance Drawing (Bloosmbury, 2020) and explores recent and established practices and questions in this field, with practical examples from the contributors' own work.

About Performance Drawing (Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall)

A visual arts book that features the expanded field of drawing, demonstrating rigorous academic research. It establishes performance drawing as a vibrant art movement that has been progressively burgeoning since 1945 and contextualises today’s contemporary approaches – questioning what is drawing and what is performance? Each chapter focuses on a different perspective of performance drawing. Embracing the different voices and various lenses, the authors combine individual yet critical methodologies. While embedded in ephemerality and immediacy, the themes encompass body and energy, time and motion, light and space, imagined and observed, demonstrating how drawing can act as a performative tool. The dynamic interaction leads to a collective understanding of the term performance drawing and addresses the key developments and future directions of this applied drawing process

Carali McCall is an artist whose research is engaged in performance and drawing. Co-author of Performance Drawing: New Practices since 1945, McCall uses her practice as a means to investigate materials, processes and expand the role of the body. Emphasising physicality, McCall’s most recent work considers drawing as both movement and stillness; addressing ‘the weight of things’, and a longing for landscape. Either carving through the landscape while running with a camera or drawing a line until the graphite stick breaks, McCall’s work engages aspects of past performances and all the while considering – how the body is shaped by practice.

Awarded an MFA at Slade School of Art in 2006 and PhD at Central Saint Martins in 2014, McCall continues to be involved in academic research and is currently working on an Arts Council England-funded work, titled RUN VERTICAL (Running up the Side of a Building). McCall continues to grow her practice was a participant in the inaugural Turps Banana MASS Correspondence course 20/21, and is currently working on a new title, the Body in Landscape. McCall is represented by Gryder Gallery, USA and Woolff Gallery, UK.

Claire Zakiewicz is an interdisciplinary artist living in London and New York. She has a background in improvised and experimental music, which she incorporates into her performance drawing and painting practice. Zakiewicz has written many articles and essays on performing drawing. She contributed a chapter for The Aesthetics of Imperfection: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished (Bloomsbury), 2020. She was named in the New York’s top ten artists list in Art511 magazine in 2019. Her works have been shown at galleries, performance venues and institutions including Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, for the exhibitions Tweet Me Up (2011) and Label (2012), at Landmark, Bergen for the performance Engastromyths Quakers and Shamans (commissioned by Ny Musikk, 2009) and most recently she produced a collaborative performance painting titled Writing the Future for Future Visions, Hounslow (2021), funded by the Arts Council, England. Past residencies have included Bill Young’s Dance Studio (New York), USF Bergen, (Norway), The Mothership (New York), Point B Worklodge (New York) and Cill Rialaig (Ireland). Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art, Anglia Ruskin University and London Metropolitan University where she did an MA by project researching the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and drawing.

Image credit: Carali McCall, Rock portrait, Lake Nippissing, Canada. 2021