Past Events
Contemporary Space Unit, , Chirstine Mackey
May 2009
Drawing: Between Art and Science, Lucy Lyons and Marta de Menezes
Lucy's understanding of drawing centres is from the viewpoint that the activity of drawing leads to understanding whilst remaining respectful of the subject being observed. For her, drawing is not mere documentation but is about participation.
Part of her exhibition at Drawing Spaces in Fabrica Braco de Prata included a selection of her research from her PhD - Delineating Disease. This body of work investigated encounters with a rare disease called FOP (Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva) and examined how drawing offered understanding and new insights to the artist and to medical experts.
Other drawings in the exhibition are a combination of images made by Lucy demonstrating her use of drawing as a way to understand experiences and phenomena she encounters, and images made by scientists working at IGC. They found that by drawing with Lucy, materials and protocols with which they were familiar, became re-seen and they gained new insight into their subjects, something they had not previously expected.
Lucy's work over the last ten years has been created in the lab or dissection room rather than in the traditional setting of the artists' studio. As a way of both bringing the lab into the gallery and demonstrating her theory on the role of drawing, Lucy allowed bacteria to grow on petri dishes left in the space. Using a microscope and drawing attachment, Lucy invited members of the public to come and draw the bacteria they saw when looking down the microscope. They engaged with something that would normally repel them and through the activity of drawing, they saw the beauty and detail in bacteria. Joining together all the drawings made, the piece 'Bacteria Drawing' grew and developed collaboratively, paralleling the growth of the actual bacteria itself.
On the 22nd of May, at 7 pm, Lucy Lyons and Marta de Menezes delivered a presentation of the project ‘Drawing: Between Art and Science’ which was followed by a Drawing Lesson under the title ‘The Draughstman/ Woman draws him/herself’ presented by Professor Ana Leonor Madeira Rodrigues.
(artists)
(speaker)
APRIL 2009
Diamond sea #2, Paulo Brighenti
diamond sea #2 was a project by Paulo Brighenti, that took place between the 15th and the 25th of April at Drawing Spaces. On the 17th of April, 7 pm, Paulo Brighenti delivered a presentation of his project which was followed by a Drawing Lesson on the ‘Pedagogies of Drawing’ with presentations by John Penny - Thoughts on drawing and the curriculum – and Garry Barker - Drawing and pedagogy.
(artist)
(speaker)
(speaker)
MARCH 2009
Graphic Diaries, Perspicacity and Neutrality in Daily Drawing, Eduardo Côrte-Real
Graphic Diaries, Perspicacity and Neutrality in Daily Drawing was a project by Eduardo Côrte-Real, which took place between the 5th and the 22nd of March, at Drawing Spaces. This project exhibited 86 Graphic Diaries which the author used for a decade to develop daily drawings. Each day a different selection of drawings was displayed, which provided the public with the opportunity to see more than one thousand observation drawings. On the 5th of March, at 7 pm the author delivered a presentation of this project which was followed by a Drawing Lesson by Jill Gibbon with the title Unofficial War Art. On the opening day the book The Smooth Guide to Travel Drawing, Um Suave Guia para o Desenho em Viagem, about the works of Eduardo Côrte-Real, was launched and this was organized and sponsored by UNIDCOM/IADE in partnership with Livros Horizonte. On this occasion Clive Dilnot (Parsons New School for Design, New York) delivered a short presentation of his text Why do we Draw? which was published on the book The Smooth Guide to Travel Drawing, Um Suave Guia para o Desenho em Viagem. On the 12th and the 19th of March, 7pm, Drawing Spaces promoted a series of round table discussions with the participations of artists and researchers debating different perspectives on the use of graphic diaries. On the 8th, 15th and 22nd of March, 4 – 7 pm, the public was invited to participate in drawing sessions using their own graphic diaries. These activities were accompanied by drawing tutors from IADE.
(artist)
(speaker)
(speakers1)
(speakers2)
FEBRUARY 2009
Drawing undone part 2, Aileen Stackhouse and Cordelia Underhill
Drawing undone part 2 was a collaborative project by Aileen Sackhouse and Cordelia Underhill that took place between the 4th and 21st of February at Drawing Spaces. Both Cordelia and Aileen use events of everyday life as catalysts for their practice. This collaborative drawing was set as a continuation of an installation project called ‘Drawing undone’, developed in 2007, which investigated ideas of pure versus corrupt drawing practices. During drawing undone part 2
Aileen and Cordelia aimed to investigate the idea of the knowing and unknowing drawing. In practice this involved testing the possibilities of extended versus compacted time and content in line and the relationship between the drawn line and the body as contained in interior and between exterior architectural space. The artists began to work separately on the same theme creating a dialectic which at times crossed and entered into each other's line and space.
On the 12th of February, 7 pm, the artists delivered a talk about their project, which was followed by a Drawing Lesson by Paulo Freire de Almeida under the title Looking Ahead – Hypotheses for the actuality of the practice of observation drawing.
(artists)
(speaker)
JANUARY 2009
Red Earth, Onya McClausand
Red Earth (displaced wall drawing) was a large scale wall drawing developed as part of a series of drawings made from materials associated with the location in which a particular work is made. This project began with the identification, location and processing of a red iron oxide pigment from Torres Novas, Portugal. The red earth, once ‘placed’ in the space as an even ground to an area of one wall was systematically erased from the ‘source’ wall and re-located to the other side of the space mark by mark with a rubber.
On the 15th of January, the artist delivered a presentation of her project, which was followed by a Drawing Lesson delivered by Jorge Silva Marques with the title The process as a starting and ending point. [An exploration of] drawing through process.
(artist)
(speaker)
DECEMBER 2008
Desenho Livre [Free Drawing], Daniel Melim
Chinese Whispers, Rachel Cohen
Desenho Livre [Free Drawing] and Chinese Whispers were two projects which were developed simultaneously between the 3rd and the 18th of December 2008 at Drawing Spaces. Both projects concerned drawing approaches based on interactions with the public. Daniel Melim produced drawings in dialogue with the public aiming to (co)respond to the descriptions of their desired images. At the end of each session Daniel offered the drawings to the participants, thus each drawing was only available to be publicly viewed during the period in which the artist was producing it. Rachel Cohen invited the public to participate in sequences of drawings which were developed from an original image. The first drawing was made by the artist. It was then copied by a participant whose drawing was afterwards copied by another participant, and so on. Even though each person attempted to copy a drawing as faithfully as they could, the images mutated gradually and soon became unrecognizable. On the 18th of December both artists participated in a session where they presented their projects and Angela Rogers delivered the 3rd Drawing Lesson hosted by Drawing Spaces with the title Drawing the spaces between us: visual encounters with strangers.
(artists)
(speaker)
NOVEMBER 2008
De-Skill, Re-Skill, Juliet MacDonald
De-skill Re-skill was a project by Juliet MacDonald involving an exhibition and a residency. It took place between the 5th and the 23rd of November at Drawing Spaces. The exhibition consisted on a series of drawings produced over a number of years representing a continuous line of enquiry. This investigation was concerned with the status of the body and the activity of drawing as a mode of embodied knowledge. In this way, the exhibited works showed an increasing concern with the body as an entanglement rather than a singular entity. They included drawings made in the street in response to the movement of people walking past and, also, a number of notes, diagrams, workings and doodles extracted from numerous files. Among the notes and diagrams there were also many drawings made quickly from glimpses of faces. Through these multiple approaches, carefully learned drawing skills were confounded by fleeting perceptual experiences. During her residency, Juliet developed a new series of drawings which were aimed to examine the manual, visual and tool-using elements that constitute drawing as a skilled practice. Her intention was to experiment with ways in which a drawing practice can incorporate dexterity and clumsiness, vision and blindness, figurative conventionality and animal immediacy. On the 13th of November Juliet delivered a presentation of her project, which was followed by the 2nd Drawing Lesson delivered by Paulo Luís Almeida with the title Faked Acts: Aspects of the performative dimension of drawing.
(artist)
(speaker)
OCTOBER 2008
Value-less, Meaning-less, Teresa Carneiro
Value-less, Meaning-less was a project by Teresa Carneiro involving an exhibition and a residency. It took place between the 8th of December and the 2nd of November 2008 at Drawing Spaces. The exhibition consisted on a series of large scale drawings made from images of small and insignificant things. The works were installed using simultaneously the walls, floor and ceiling of the space, resisting the separation between the space occupied by the drawings and the space inhabited by the visitors. In this way, the drawings were made flexible not only to their relationship to the space of the exhibition, but also to their relation to the viewers/inhabitants of the space during the exhibition period. The residency (8-15 October) took place at the front room of Drawing Spaces and it involved the production of a collective large scale drawing (5.40m). This work was made from an image of a used screw, which was fragmented and distributed among the participants, giving them access only to squares of 1 × 1 cm which were to be reproduced into drawings of 20 × 20 cm, using HB pencils. The drawings were mounted on the walls as they were developed, which allowed the visitors to gain access to the different stages of the development of this collective work. This drawing was produced with the collaboration of Ana Cabral, Daniel Melim, Inês Marques, Joana Tavares, João Palla, Lucas Almeida, Luís Almeida, Luís Gomes, Margarida Naves, Mariana Perry, Miguel Marreiros, Nuno Neves, Rita Ruivo, Rita Thomaz, Sara Chang Yan and Tiago Gundra. This was the Part I of a project that continued, later on, at MEANTIME Project space, Cheltenham, in November 2008. http://www.meantime.org.uk/archive/
On the 16th of October Teresa participated in a symposium where she presented her project. This was followed by the 1st Drawing Lesson by Vítor Manuel Oliveira da Silva under the title «Waiting for Success» by Henrique Pousão, a presentation by Nuno Nabais where he addressed the relation of drawing and scale, an a presentation by Catarina Nabais, Marco Pina, Joana Mesquita and Flávia Neves called The Image in Science and Art. Presentation of a project (Centre for the Philosophy of Sciences, University of Lisbon).
(artist)
(speaker)
© 2008-2009 Espaços do Desenho – Drawing Spaces • Todos os direitos reservados • All rights reserved