Performance Drawing 2021

Performance Drawing 2021 presents works by international artists whose practice stretches, pulls, pushes and steps across disciplines relating to drawing and performance.

To mark the first anniversary of the publication, Performance Drawing: New Practices since 1945 (Bloomsbury 2020), the Centre for Recent Drawing presents an online show and in-person residency with curated events that extends the initial exploration of works in the book and considers the future of practice at the intersection of drawing and performance. Featured artists’ works were made since the date of writing and develop the book’s themes in new directions: Adelaide Damoah, Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall, Maryclare Foá, Maurice Moore, Piyali Ghosh, Ram Samocha, sophia bartholomew. 

Adelaide Domoah 

A Litany for Survival, 2019, is a visceral, powerful work by Adelaide Domoah inspired by Audre Lorde’s poem of the same name. In her performance, Domoah addresses physicality and the body in struggle. Her works can be seen as referencing various performance drawing actions in paint, from past to present.  

Maurice Moore 

In Drawing While Black, aka Black Boy Joy, 2020, Maurice Moore marks on brown paper and/or on black board while dancing in a hand-crafted mask. Travelling back and forth in a defiant gestural flow, Moore applies rhythmic marks that references both the joy of dance and the defiance of black queer dance culture. 

Piyali Ghosh 

In Naksha an Untold Odyssey, 2019, Piyali Ghosh embodies drawing and becomes the gestural moving sculpture that is in conversation with the material of her drawn works; addressing elements of ritual and also the performative process. As her body becomes the space, she is performative: interacting with her work and sometimes wearing pieces as costume. 

Ram Samocha 

In Mountain Range Outline, 2020, Ram Samocha traces the ridges of a mountain range in the distance with a tube of condensed milk on cellophane. Responding directly to the landscape, Samocha reimages the scenery and in so doing, also references both the personal and the rural. 

sophia bartholomew 

sophia bartholomew’s work The strand like the spirit: the spirit like the breath, 2021, references the landscape, wind, snow, wide open space. The work expands the notion of performance drawing to include the history of the body’s presence in the environment; using their own voice as a sounding.

C4RD Residency (14th Sept – 14th Oct 2021)

During the residency, Foá, Hosea and McCall will be investigating their individual practice as well as working in collaborations that include drawing, performance and the curation of online events. The aim is to reflect on their publication, Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 (2020), and to address new issues raised by the artists’ work in the exhibition Performance Drawing 2021.

Events Programme:

Performance Drawing 2021 online exhibition in browser-based VR with Adelaide Damoah, Maurice Moore, Piyali Ghosh, Ram Samocha, sophia bartholomew (curated by Foá, Hosea and McCall)  – 14 Sept – 14th Oct

Foá, Hosea and McCall Residency at C4RD – 14 Sept – 14th Oct 

Piyali Ghosh performance on Instagram Live, Sat 18th Sept 5pm (BST)

Ram Samocha performance on Instagram Live Sat 25th Sept 7pm (BST)

sophia bartholomew performance on Instagram Live Sat 2nd Oct 5pm (BST)

Draw to Perform: Ram Samocha interviews Maryclare Foá, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall. Sun 3rd Oct 8pm BST.  Book on EventBrite.

Adelaide Damoah, Maurice Moore and Ram Samocha in conversation with Foá, Hosea and McCall. Tues 5th Oct 7pm BST. Book on EventBrite.

Birgitta Hosea/Carali McCall/Claire Zakiewicz performance at Hundred Years Gallery. Weds 13th Oct. Curated by Claire Zakiewicz. Book on EventBrite (link TBC)

Piyali Ghosh and sophia bartholomew in conversation with Foá, Hosea and McCall. Thurs 14th Oct 6pm BST. Book on EventBrite.

Register on Eventbrite

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On Collaboration: Scores for Drawing

In this presentation, Birgitta Hosea talks about the collaboration between herself, Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood and Carali McCall that resulted in the book Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2000).

Using material from chapter 3, in itself a collaboration between herself and Foá, she considers the score as a form with which to invite participation and unexpected results when working with others. The presentation concludes with an overview of a participatory project in live animation.

dotdot dash

dotdot dash, Birgitta Hosea 2018-9

Participatory light action with lasers and improvised voice designed for public space. Originally commissioned by InspiralLondon. More info here.

Night Walking North Kent Festival, Gravesend, 2018:

London As Park City Festival, Regents Canal, 2018:

Directions for the visual music come from a chance-based score made by walking on musical paper:

Homunculous, 2016

Migration – a slow scattering (2016) images from Maryclare Foà’s initial proposal:

Migration – a slow scattering (2016) performance by Maryclare Foà

Shadow Ship (2016) projected animation and smashed sugar by Birgitta Hosea

Rosary Drawing XII, 2015

[Rosary Drawing XII performance, rehearsal in studio, Birgitta Hosea, 2015]

[Remnants from Rosary Drawing XII performance, Birgitta Hosea, 2015]

This work was developed by Birgitta Hosea during a residency in a former convent in Atina, Lazio, Italy that was organised and curated by Rekha Sameer.

Although brought up aetheist, Birgitta Hosea spent the entire residency drawing her recently deceased and much mourned Swedish grandmother’s broken rosary beads and trying to learn more about the Catholic faith of her mother’s family.

The more she drew, the more she began to think about about both of her grandmothers, one Swedish, one Scottish, and indeed about all of the women who work tirelessly and selflessly for their families: invisible labour that is taken for granted and forgotten about.

[Image by Chris Simpson, 2015, cropped]

By the 12th drawing, she decided to use the tools and materials of domestic cleaning to make a drawing of the rosary beads – scrubbing away the paper to create the highlighlights on each bead. As the antique Roman floor was too delicate to make a performance using scouring on, out of the the many drawings she had made, at the final exhibition she chose to only show these.

[Rosary Drawing XII, Atina Residency exhibition, Palazzo Ducale dei Cantelmo, Atina, Italy, 2015]

For Hosea, this work captured everything she had learnt on the residency – that the actions of cleaning and the time taken to scrub each piece of paper could be recorded in a sequence of images that ressemble a filmstrip.  Like a filmstrip, the rosary is also a device to record actions over time – the prayers that are supposed to be said for each bead. So for her, this work is a type of animation.

Asked to submit experimental animation for Beyond Noumenon, an exhibition and forum at Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in Chongqing, China, she submitted a proposal to perform this work as a piece of live animation and, to her surprise, was accepted with great enthusiasm and generosity by curators Tingting Lu and Tianran Duan.

She then performed the drawing at the private view next to other wall-based sequential images she had made. Scrubbed clean of all makeup, on her hands and knees, she said invocations while going through the rosary beads and scrubbed one piece of paper for each bead on the string.

[Rosary Drawing XII performance, Birgitta Hosea, Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts, 2016]

Following this exhibition, she performed the work again at 51% Remember Her, a group exhibition of feminist art curated by Rebecca Feiner at Tower Gallery, London.

[Rosary Drawing XII performance, Birgitta Hosea, Tower Gallery, London, 2017]

Click here to view the 51% Remember Her catalogue: 51%_Catalogue

This work then became part of her solo show Erasure, at Hanmi Gallery, Seoul, Korea in 2018. View catalogue here.

Interview about the show by Studio International.

Footage of the show (silent) with video documentation of Rosary XII performance at the private view:

Draw to Perform

Draw to Perform is a three-day symposium on performance drawing curated by Ram Samocha at Arbeit Gallery and the ]Performance Space[ in Hackney Wick, London from 5-7 December 2013.

Carali McCall and Jane Grisewood will perform live on Thursday 6th December at the ]Performance Space[ between 6-10pm. Maryclare Foa and Birgitta Hosea will give a performative lecture as part of a series of discussions and talks about performance drawing on Saturday 7th December from 2-6pm at the ]Performance Space[.

For documentation of Carali McCall and Jane Grisewood’s performance see: http://janegrisewood.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/draw-to-perform.

Drawing Animation

Drawn Together’s work is featured in Birgitta Hosea’s  article ‘Drawing Animation’ in the Drawing Interdisciplinary Journal. Click here to read the abstract: http://anm.sagepub.com/content/5/3/353.abstract.

Drawn Together Artists Websites

We are associated with the International Centre for Fine Art Research.

Each member of Drawn Together has a website documenting their individual practice:

Maryclare Foá
Jane Grisewood
Birgitta Hosea
Carali McCall

Drawn Together… an introduction

MaryClare Foá’s performance drawing is in response to the environment. She investigates how a drawing affects an environment and how that environment might affect that drawing.

Jane Grisewood uses the ‘line’ and the process of ‘drawing’ lines as a way to explore notions of temporality and transience, place and memory. The line is a journey, a between space, always in movement.

Birgitta Hosea investigates animation as performance. Can animation be seen as a type of performance? Where is the site of the performance? Is the process of creating animation performative?

Carali McCall’s artwork traces the relevant essential aspects of process within performance art and sculpture and contributes to locating the specific area she defines as process-led performance art.