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:
Notes on a Table (House of Illustration) 2016 (performance by Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall)
8-9th July 2016, MarKings, Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins UAL/House of Illustration
Approximately: 240 x 128 cm, conversation, sound, graphite and coloured crayon on paper
Event review by John Miers in Spark Journal
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
Posted in expanded animation, performance art
Tagged Birgitta Hosea, expanded animation, MaryClare Foá, performance art
[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:
Maryclare Foá performing as Lily the Cowboy with Regine Bartsch, as part of Bartsch’s residency at C4RD (the Centre for Recent Drawing), London, October 2014.
Fresh from the Folkestone Triennial Fringe, this touring exhibition curated by Birgitta Hosea brings together new work from Foa + Hosea, Carali McCall, Anne Robinson, Sarah Sparkes and Thurle Wright. Using a range of media – drawing, animation, performance to video, light installation, painting and collage, the works engage with living with the constant presence of an absence through the metaphor of waiting for someone to return from sea.
OPEN FROM 12-6pm on: 27th, 28th September and 1-5th October
PRIVATE VIEW: Friday 26th September 6-8pm – if you would like to attend – register for the Private View on Facebook or EventBrite
[Invite image Jane Conquest Rings the Bell (detail) Sarah Sparkes, mixed media, 2014]
Taking place in a former waiting room for the Folkestone ferry, SEeAFAR features six artists – Foa + Hosea, Carali McCall, Anne Robinson, Sarah Sparkes, Thurle Wright – whose work manifests absence. Through drawing, painting, installation, performance and moving image, these artworks recall the perspective of generations of women living in a state of unknowing as they wait for news or the return of loved ones from overseas and explore the tensions between anticipation and memory, separation and speculation.
Since the Performance Drawing Collective was founded in 2008, we have been excited about collaborating with other artists in this field. Last year, in May 2013, Birgitta Hosea curated an event, Dialogues on Performance II: Drawing Performance – Performing Drawing, at Central Saint Martins with presentations of the work of staff and PhD students at CSM who are working in this area. After this, in December 2013, all four members of the collective participated in Draw to Perform, a three day symposium curated by Ram Samocha at ]Performance Space[.
As the symposium had featured the work of many artists and raised some fascinating issues, Birgitta and Ram worked together to organise Dialogues on Performance III: Draw to Perform, at Central Saint Martins to show documentation from the event and presentations from some of the participating artists.
Watch the full seminar here, or scroll down for a summary, photos and sketches from the event.
Here are notes from the event. Apologies to the speakers if there are any misspellings or if anything was misheard.
Birgitta Hosea introduces Ram Samocha and that this event shows documentation from the original event and symposium, curated by Ram Samocha. She is pleased to be able to show this work at Central Saint Martins.
Ram introduces himself as a studio artist at ]Performance Space[. He developed his original idea for a symposium on drawing performance, because he often got questions after his own live performances when people would ask him if he was doing performance art and he would reply, ‘yes, I am doing a drawn performance this’. This reaction to the work interested him. When he started his residency at Performance Space with artists doing performance art, people were asking him if he was a designer or what he was doing. In response to this, he wanted to look for other people doing the same practice as he did.
[Maryclare’s notes]
He started to collect artists through the web or through personal recommendation of people who did similar work. For the symposium, he approached 20 artists from all over the world with zero budget and asked if they wanted to participate and the response was unbelievable even though he didn’t have a budget. This strong response made him realise that there is something going on. People are doing more live drawing actions. This made it clear to him that the discussion would be interesting and relevant. The first day of the 3 day symposium was a screening for artists from outside London. The second day featured live live drawing event. The third day was a discussion panel. At this event today, the presenters will show some of the things that had happened during these three days. Ram then showed a short video compilation of the performances.
Here’s a different compilation video Ram made previously of artist images from Draw to Perform:
Next Birgitta Hosea explained that herself and Maryclare Foá often collaborated under the name Foá+Hosea and that they would re-enact the performative lecture they gave on day three of the original symposium. At the time, Birgitta was in China, so her contribution was in the form of a video created in Maryclare’s studio.
The video starts with Maryclare’s disembodied voice explaining that the presentation will focus on revealing the historical emergence of performance drawing within the contemporary art context. The aim is to examine notions of what performance drawing might be, while expanding the perimeters rather than constraining or restricting its potential to a narrow range of conformist conventions. In the video, Birgitta holds up a series of placards while Maryclare is talking. The live Maryclare heckles and disrupts her pre-recorded voice by interrupting or singing along with her original speech. In this re-presentation of the original lecture, Birgitta held up the same placards again, an echo in the current time of her past actions.
Maryclare then goes on to give a history of the many artists who have created work that has contributed to a contemporary understanding of performance drawing. While she is speaking, in the video Birgitta goes through piles of books and holds them up to the camera when a particular artist is mentioned to physically show the original reference. This text draws upon Maryclare’s original research for her PhD, Sounding Out: Performance Drawing in Relation to the Outside Environment, which is available for download here.
[Photo by Birgitta Hosea]
Birgitta then interrupts Maryclare to talk about animation and the connections between performance drawing and drawn animation. Her text is adapted from the paper she wrote for Animation Interdisciplinary Journal on Drawing Animation and can be downloaded here [requires subscription]. It also draws upon her PhD research on the animator as a performer. Her PhD, Substitutive Bodies and Constructed Actors: a Practice-based Investigation of Animation as Performance, can be downloaded here. While Birgitta is talking on video, the real Maryclare holds up placards with drawings on. In this re-presentation of the original lecture, She echoes words from the pre-recorded script and also references two audience members, Malcolm Cook and Steve Roberts, as experts in aspects that she mentioned (the Lightning Sketch act and traditional character animation respectively).
The audience all had cards on their seats with a 0 and one side and a 1 on the other. At the end of the presentation, Maryclare invited the audience to enact a digital drawing by holding up one side of the card to their face and then the other, while Birgitta photographed them.
[Photo by Birgitta Hosea]
The full text of Foá+Hosea’s talk can be downloaded here: DRAW TO PERFORM. For further details, full references and bibliography, consult the source documents listed above.
Carali McCall had been invited to talk about the work she had made with Jane Grisewood, Line Dialogues. The pair had made a series of these, including one version created with all four members of the Performance Drawing Collective for line process echo repeat2 during their first residency at the Centre for Drawing Project Space, Wimbledon College of Art. Unfortunately, Carali was unable to attend so Birgitta read out a short text and showed a video of a new piece of work she has recently created, Work no. 4 (Restraint / Running) Back Hill, 2013.
[Still from the video documentation of Work no. 4 (Restraint / Running) Back Hill]
Carali’s statement, “In an area of performance drawing, which considers drawing to be connected to movement through the act of doing and physical activity, this performance addresses what it means to use the extreme form of physical activity – running. Using (myself) the runner to articulate an understanding of how the body moves through space, I use the ‘breath’ and the discipline of marathon training to explore how the physical act of running can be a viable form of drawing.”
Kimbal Quist Bumstead explained that he is interested in performances that involve disconnection. Initially, he was going to be in another country during Draw to Perform, so he wanted to do something from a distance. He first thought of using SKYPE, but then became interested in the idea of exploring a phone call and talking to one person at a time. Drawing is only one aspect of what he does. He is also going to show documentation of a few other works to contextualise what he has done. For him, drawing is a tool for interaction: the final product of the drawing is not the main point it is a motivation for the action. The drawing becomes a trace or a documentation of a dialogue rather than an end in itself.
[Photo by Birgitta Hosea]
The background to the work is that his Grandmother just went into a nursing home. They were always a bit distant and he never felt comfortable in her house. Recently she has started to develop dementia, can’t live independently any more and has to go into a care home. He wanted to do a journey around her house and connect the objects to memories using the audience member as a medium to trace his memories. During the exhibition, you dialled the only number on a mobile phone and you’d get through to him on a mobile phone at his Grandmother’s house. He would pick up object and describe it, sometimes not even knowing what they were. In the house, he felt like an intruder. There were old photos of him, his brother, his Dad and other family members tucked away in drawers and not displayed. Photos were never important to her. Whenever someone sat down in the exhibition, he would start describing something. The audience member had to put a blindfold on and draw according to his instructions.
He didn’t want the focus to be on the drawing itself, but on the act of listening and thinking about the object. The resulting drawings are interesting, but he doesn’t need to exhibit them. The artwork was the live performance. The act has been and gone. The drawings are not the artwork.
He shows photos from her house – in the bedroom, on the mantle piece. It was all a very emotional experience for him, trying to get close to her. He had an idea of emptiness. She has let go of her house and moved into a nursing home. She had no intention of going back and let go of all her possessions. He also wanted to explore this detachment – her from her home – him from her – him from the audience.
In previous works that lead to this, he was very interested in home and memories. At ]Performance Space[ he was describing the house he was born in and got someone to translate it over the phone and show it the rest of the audience, using the same idea.
In another piece of work, he had his family drawings from when he was 3. Each drawing had a story about his family and then he asked the audience members to draw a picture of the house where he grew up. The main point he wants to express is that the act of drawing and the act of performing is about the body itself being a vessel to transport memories and the interaction between the performance and the audience member. The idea behind these drawings is a focus to create and generate an interaction between performer and audience member.
He is also interested in the idea of drawing through touch. In another piece of work, he interacts with a stranger and makes a drawing of their face while blindfolded and touching their face. He becomes a vessel translating touch into a drawing. Drawing is a performative act, is a tool.
The event was then opened to the audience for discussion. As the discussion was lively and the notetaker was also one of the panel, this is a summary and some elements and nuances may have been missed. It was impossible to capture the names of the people who asked the questions.
[Maryclare’s notes]
Q. to Kimbal: How did the work change your relationship to your Grandmother or your experience of feeling detached?
A. He felt like he knew her better and warmed to her. His Dad had power of attorney. They had discussed the project and he had full permission to be there. He felt it was an act of homage to her. She was a family member and he felt a deep sense of regret to not know her better. He did feel like a trespasser and it was also a sad occasion to find presents he’d given her stored in the cupboard, but still unopened. There was a real sense of sadness. He’d transferred old cine film onto DVD for her, but she had never looked at them. She had totally let go of the past. Didn’t want to go back there. He felt he now knew and liked her better, but in reality is not closer to her and is very sad that she’s very sick. In terms of the other pieces, it’s an illusion of closeness. He has done other pieces exploring physical intimacy with strangers and using sound etc, but its only an illusion of intimacy, not real intimacy.
Q. to Kimbal: How much do you as a person want to get close to the idea of telepathy? On the level of emotion? Mind to mind? On the emotional or mental level?
A. He’s not ever thought of his work in terms of telepathy. He believes in synchronicity – things happen for a reason – but not as far as telepathy. He didn’t really know why he wanted to do this work.
Q. Suggests he is searching for telepathy. What is his drive to do this work?
A. His drive is selfish, about the personal connection. The reason he does artwork is because its an interesting concept to explore and curiosity. He doesn’t know how to answer that as he’s never thought of his work as telepathy although he is interested in alternative methods of communication.
Q. Most of my experience of performance is in theatre, where there is a formal idea of mutuality. The audience pays money for a ticket. The performers do something. The audience gets their moneys worth. In these works, what does the audience give you, the artist, when you perform?
A. Ram – the audience and live drawing is a tricky subject. When he does search for an interaction it’s something about finding a communication. As an artist, he finds when he gives an audience the freedom to draw, to be creative it could end up with an uninteresting object or process. Sometimes his actions involve giving the audience specific instructions, but the audience doesn’t always want to do what they are told. Like dancing together this can be a powerful experience.
A. Maryclare – her first audience is Birgitta – sounding off ideas. The second is the audience in the space – she thinks its a quasi performance – it’s not acting.
Q. You are occupying territory between theatre and film, potentially redefining the relationship between performer and audience.
A. Kimbal – However much you can break down the barrier artist and performer and give the audience a specific task, there is a beauty when people take their own initiative and do their own thing. The question is to what extent do you give the audience freedom and to what extent does it interfere with the work.
Q. How do you evaluate if your concept was successful if your instruction was followed but they don’t react how you elected them to?
A. Ram – the interesting thing is the performance and the act itself it is the artefact not the drawing which is residue.
A. Birgitta – For me what is interesting is being in the moment and not recorded. In this I am very influenced by Zen Buddhism. For me, liveness is a material, presence is a material, physicality is a material – it’s about the process. In the Deleuzian sense, it’s a becoming. But of course, the work is partly done for the camera, for the documentation, for the people who couldn’t be there.
[Photo by Ram Samocha]
Q. to Foá+Hosea: Why did you call it a re-presentation of your performative lecture rather than a performance? –
A. Birgitta – Because we used the same video and script rather than doing it afresh as a new piece
A. Maryclare – You had to be there: performance is ephemeral. We were making a link between the recording and the live performance – if we did it again it would be different.
Q There were interesting multiple temporal levels as opposed to a traditional live performance with immediacy between performer and audience, but there is also a level of rehearsal and preparation. The experience of the audience – they don’t know what will be coming next and they experience time differently from the performers who do know. The different temporal layering is interesting in this work – engaging with the audience on different temporal levels. That is more of a statement, so my question is – what is the role of the rehearsal? How much is it spontaneous – how much is rehearsed – how much does it change from time to time?
A. Ram – if he thinks about his process as opposed to pioneer artists in the 70s and in Happenings etc, he is trying to achieve something different. He always has an image that he want to achieve and get to. There is always a plan. He is thinking when the live night started at Draw to Perform and there was an official camer man who specialised in documenting performance artists and their actions – he was shocked how many people were there with their cameras. From the exhibition he just had – Remnants at the Hatched Gallery – what does he do with what is left over?
A. Maryclare – is fascinated by the idea that we explore time differently and that there is a split in time between performers and the audience. Birgitta and her did do some rehearsing, because we feel more relaxed if we know what we were doing, so we had rehearsed and wanted to know if the interruption or subversion of the video would work. But it’s also multi-layered in terms of time as the performative lecture draws on research from our PhDs. We can’t ad lib or give presentation without notes.
Q. So is performance defined by having been done it before and having been practised before or it completely improvised?
A. Ram – it’s about seeking a connection, an interaction with a live audience. Jackson Pollock in the videos looks as if he knows what he is doing and has a plan.
A. Birgitta – I think it was Eugenio Barba? who said that performance is a twice performed action – repeating something that has been planned and prepared. Improvisation is an illusion as it draws upon a repertoire of tried and tested behaviours.
A. Kimbal – You can’t predict how an audience will react to the situation you have set up. The element of spontaneity and chance is important. There is a framework of what would happen set up, but the results are unknown.
[Maryclare’s notes]
Q. What is the purpose of the remnant? It’s not important to Kimbal? How do you evaluate a successful drawn performance?
A. Kimbal – The drawings are a trace – the task of the interaction is more important.
A. Birgitta – the work can be evaluated through peer review, audience feedback and reflecting on the documentation afterwards.
Q. Is there a concept behind this work or is it just about the experience?
A. Ram – In his recent performance at the Hatched Gallery, there was always someone there, but sometimes he wanted to be alone. He wanted to focus on the act rather than the acting.
A. Maryclare – She thinks a performance is anything done in front of anyone else.
Q Could success be defined in terms of Walter Benjamin and having an aura – is being successful in terms of being near the act of making?
A. Maryclare disagrees. A performance could be continually remade.
Q. The closer you are to the aura the less mediated the work is is the stronger the aura?
A. Maryclare likes the dance between the live and the recorded.
Q In all the range of art, there are three different mediums – drawing, painting and photography. Time is not included. To achieve something that has validity it should be two dimensional drawing and painting. All you are doing is adding a dimension of sound, time and movement to the flat 2d drawing. You are just adding more dimensions, because it’s more busy. He thinks the current generation is making work that is just adding more and more dimensions and becoming like a circus. He thinks it’s about putting time into the work – the ambition is zero – its just about more and more noise.
A. Ram explains that the questioner was a performer artist in the 70s and now has turned to painting. But what is interesting nowadays, in terms of the concept of drawing performance and performance itself, is that lots of things happening over the internet. People are searching for things you can’t do over the internet – a primary connection between people. He meets more and more people that want to connect in a live situation.
A. Birgitta says that they need to wrap and and vacate the room so let’s leave it on the note of connecting in a live situation and anyone who want to continue the discussion in the canteen – please do so. The audience is reminded of the next Draw to Perform event, planned for December.
Posted in performance art, performance drawing
Tagged Draw to Perform, performance art, performance drawing
2-4pm, 3rd July 2014, Room C202, Central Saint Martins, Granary Square, Kings Cross, London N1C 4AA
Presentations by Kimbal Quist Bumstead, Foá + Hosea, Carali McCall, Ram Samocha
This event is free. To book a place register at: https://drawtoperform.eventbrite.co.uk
[Collage by Ram Samocha]
In December 2013 arebyte Gallery and ]performance s p a c e [ held ‘Draw to Perform’, the first international symposium on the connection between performance art and drawing and the relevance of drawing as a modern medium, curated by artist Ram Samocha.
Central Saint Martins will host presentations of documentation from this event as well as discussion. Like the original symposium, this event aims to promote the growing stream of live drawing performance, to distinguish it as a unique entity and allow it to rise from the eclectic, wider definition of performance art.
Artists’ work will be presented that is fundamentally concerned with drawing, in that drawing connects elements of line, movement, space and time and physicality, as mark-making is the result of gesture and body movement. For some, drawing is rather conceived as installation, video, performance, painting, writing and animation. Many of the participating artists are interested in exploring the idea of trace as memory and in connection to temporality. Others focus on the physical and sensorial experience of drawing, either in relation to human body proportions or to physical exercise.
Supported by Performance Research at Central Saint Martins
Posted in performance art, performance drawing
Tagged Draw to Perform, performance art, performance drawing
Drawology, 20 November – 6 December 2013, Bonington building, Nottingham Trent University
Included in the Drawology exhibition in Nottingham were three short film documentations of temporary drawings by Maryclare Foa.
Line Down Manhattan (2003) 7 :05
An action: walking the length of Manhattan Island, dragging a chalk line from Broadway Bridge to Battery Park. The recorded sounds revealed (more than the images) the different communities and the material conditions of place- triggering my awareness of the vital and phenomenological affects of sound in relation to place.
House in Search of Belonging (2006) 13:20
A number of actions temporarily constructing a physical drawing of the outline of a house (from sticks), referencing Bachelard’s Dream House and a phenomenological response to locations associated with my life. ‘Through dreams the various dwelling places in our lives co–penetrate and retain the treasures of former days…’ (G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans M. Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1969. p5).
The Dissenters Driftsong (2009) 9:14
A multivoiced and collaborative vocal response to place (Bunhill Fields Cemetery), evidencing a sonic interaction between place and practitioner- this vocal drawing process is a phenomenological method employing the practitioners body as the drawing tool and the voice as material.
Artist’s Statement
Just as writing, singing, dancing, and scientific research (to name a few creative processes), are methods employed by practitioners to reinterpret, explore and investigate various phenomena, drawing is also employed by practitioners to reinterpret explore and investigate from the observing or imagining eye, ear and mind. In this way it may be said that the practitioner who employs drawing as a process may do so as a phenomenological enquiry.
During my PhD research; looking for evidence of interactions between outside environments and the practitioner while making work, I documented a number of different methods of drawing in response to place. I would define these drawings as having employed a phenomenological process because during the making of each drawing- whether walked, built or sung, a heightened awareness of the self in relation to place and vice versa was facilitated. The camera documented the different drawing processes, evidencing physiological, narrative, material, and emotional phenomena of the process, the context and the practitioner. And despite the temporary material of motion, trace, fleeting structure, and passing sound, the drawings contained within themselves the narrative and herstory of their own making.
Posted in performance art, performance drawing
Tagged drawology, performance art, performance drawing
Drawn Together: 