Song for The Wꜵnderfull Gentle Ones

Maryclare Foa (as Ray & Flare Mo), Song for The Wꜵnderfull Gentle Ones
Enshrine, Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Parish Church, London, July 2018

The Work: A short action, performed once, leaving traces as a prayer.

Background:

Narratives of the past and present have most often written those of a gender other than male as insignificant, but there have been many gentle and other ones who have contributed much wꜵnder to the world.

From Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya, who knew of the howless, to Mother Meera who came to find how to activate electricity, our world has been peopled by seekers, and mystics of many different beliefs, each one perpetuating the light and love of all creatures and also of this planet. Poems in celebration and word’s of these mystics are sung in this crypt of prayer, as a collective [t]h[e]ymn in these times ‘when things fall apart’ to ‘set the world ablaze’ with  ‘… a new culture of compassion’.

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MarKings: symposium and festival of performance and drawing

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

Drawn Together

MaryClare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall are collaborating as ‘Drawn Together’ on projects to address the relationship to body and presence, time and space through performance drawing.

Tracing a dialogue with the line in their individual practice, they collectively materialise performances incorporating mark-making, animation, sound and video. In their first collaboration, line process echo repeat, Foá, drawing through sound, developed a drawn score and contemporary songline, while Hosea created an interactive digital performance with projected animation. Led by process and repetitive movement, Grisewood and McCall performed a one-hour wall drawing, marking time and challenging endurance.

The artists’ diverse practices intersect through the shared concerns with how performative drawing can in different ways reveal temporal and spatial understanding of place and space. Their personal approaches allow numerous narratives to be played out in a single location.

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.