Symposium call for proposals: (deadline passed)
We will be hosting a radical symposium at Leeds School of Arts with keynote speaker Dr. Deborah Harty, a practitioner researcher and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Loughborough University and runs our much-appreciated Drawing Research Network (DRN).
Known for her explorations into the phenomenology of drawing based on Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology in The Primacy of Perception: and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics (1964) and how specific phenomena are apprehended and mediated by the body, the artist’s view of ‘being-in-the-world’, Harty’s research has provided the foundation for many discussions on the time-space of drawing and drawing environments as part of DRN’s ongoing rigor. Ecologies of Drawing: Drawing: In Situ (2022) prompts this Symposium and our call for presentations.
Drawing is one of the most economical and democratic methods of expression, requiring only a mark-making tool and surface. The tools have altered into technological innovation in animation, the body, and objects as tools while the surfaces have evolved into ground, sites, and even buildings. Drawing is now ‘drawing with, and ‘drawing in’ (Ingold, 2013) rather than ‘drawing of’, focussing on process and critical relationships.
This symposium will bring together a range of methodologies to explore this potential, including feminism, post-colonialism, play theory, activism, critical theory, and new materialism, united by an emphasis on drawing practice.
We are particularly interested in our special focus on drawing ecologies in relation to localities, climate change, political and environmental intersections of place, gender, and cultural ecologies in the broadest sense due to the increased research on our entanglements with environments. This includes maritime and watery environments, small islands, and intersections with political and cultural issues of conflict and displacement. Proposals may consider innovations with ethnographic drawing, Drawing as Mapping, De-colonisation of drawing, drawing as data and policy and Drawing acts/performances/films in terms of located and situated bodies and may extend to entanglements of non-human species to think of ecologies in terms of correspondence ‘with’ environments.
This call asks for drawing presentations, proposals and works to demonstrate the range of drawing activities that expanded drawing has now come to encompass.
Symposium Outline:
The presentations will include various activities and outputs such as performances, table conversations, workshops, short films and poster presentations, talks, performances and interviews bringing together unique rigour in artistic and academic presentations. Film Event in LSA Cinema. Short films max 5 - 7 minutes as mp4. Please submit a proposal and abstract on your film with a jpeg screenshot of the work. Foyer poster Exhibition in LSA, please provide a proposal for a Poster and/or image of your work for either A2 or A1 size. Presentation proposals for no more than 15 minutes. These can be a presentation of a paper (no papers to be read during for this event), a piece of drawing research, performed, a debate, table conversation or other. This is a short turn-around as we are looking for vibrant and experimental activities to create the day.
Please submit proposals of:
300-word min - max 500-word proposal
ONE good quality image of your work
100 - 150-word biography
To j.leah@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
for 25th March 2024
5pm.
Selections will be notified by Monday 15th April 2024.
Best wishes, and we look forward to hearing from you!
Joanna with Jill Gibbon, Zara Worth and Simon Ringe
Dr. Joanna Leah
no pronouns - use my name
Senior Lecturer Contextual Studies and Research Methods Art & Design
Working Days Monday - Thursday
Research Day - Friday
Leeds School of Arts
Leeds Beckett University,
Email: j.leah@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Website: https://www.joannaleah.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Joannaleah7
Instagram: JoannaLeah_art
Publications:
Joanna Leah, ‘blubilds; drawing diagramamtic stains’, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, Volume 7. Issue 2. Oct 2022, p.267 - 283. https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/drtp_00095_1.
Joanna Leah Geldard, ‘A Processional Blueprint for Our Edgelands: Exploring a Spatial Model between Site and Elsewhere’, The Arts In Society, The International Journal of New Media, Technology and the Arts, Volume 12. Issue 3. Aug 2017. Common Ground Publishing doi:10.18848/2326-9987/CGP/v12i03/13-26.doi:10.18848/2326-9987/CGP/v12i03/13-26.
Receive Drawing. Draw Drawing. Gift Drawing.
Five Years Correspondence Project:
Jhinuk Sarkar, Carol Mancke, Edward Dorrian, Ilga Leimanis, Sally Morfill
Leeds Drawing Articulations Symposium
Outline of work/Proposal of drawing research:
Receive Drawing. Draw Drawing. Gift Drawing.
- The correspondence drawing is in parts.
We respond to the symposium call with
a call to respond/ participate/ draw.
We invite everyone here to engage in a collective interplay of giving and receiving. Using your own vocabulary of mark-making you are asked to draw, gift, and share with others contributing to a series of loose-leaf drawings. A drawing in and into all aspects of the symposium.
- We respond to the call to respond/ participate/ draw with
a call to publish.
We invite everyone here who engaged in a collective interplay of giving and receiving, and who contributed to a series of loose-leaf drawings, to allow these drawings to be collated as black & white facsimiles into a bound publication.
Anoymously.
A drawing book to be accessed by anyone. Our proposed intervention in this symposium is a way for us to draw a shared articulation of ‘gift’, that questions our understanding of the risk involved in constituting any ‘collectivity’ ‘community’ and ‘drawing’.
Technical specifications/ instructions:
Paper size: A5 folded from A4
Page size: Perforated page 168 x 280 mm
Drawing materials: Anything at hand.
Draft Publication/ Drawing Book: Black & White/grayscale scans
Terms & conditionsThe drawing/s will be anonymous. No editing made after the event.
Drawing Articulations: A Radical Drawing Symposium 2024.
Hosted at Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University (LSA)
26 June 2024Published on demand by Five Years & [DRAWING-RESEARCH].
Drawing Articulations a Radical Drawing Symposium 2024
ISBN 978-1-903724-23-1
All rights the participants, not the publisher.
For anyone who wishes to be credited, an index of participant names can be placed as part of the publication.
.................................................
Notes: Five Years' response/ accepted proposal
Thursday 28 March 2024
Notes from Teams conversation (27 March) about what we might propose for this symposium: We don’t want to do a ‘presentation’ but would like to do something that echos/mirrors/mimics the project and interweave it into the symposium day. For example: a few ‘gift’ drawings are started (by us) and passed, each in its own envelope, as a ‘gift’ to another participant/audience member at the symposium, with instructions that they then add something and ‘gift’ it on to someone else, etc. Collaborative ‘gift’ drawings might be unveiled at the end of the day, as part of an open discussion (round table?) with symposium participants and audience
Like passing notes in school, Exquisite corpse. Submit as Five Years Correspondence Project (not individuals. Would our names be listed as members of the project? A few of us are able to attend: Write the proposal collaboratively - mimic the project using a google doc (_ to set up). Content might be: What we did so far; our proposal to do a version of it in the symposium, an example of how we might do it. The form our proposal takes might be itself ‘radical’ - a poem?
Friday 5 April 2024
Five Years to Drawing Articulations a Radical Drawing Symposium
Dear Joanna Leah, Jill Gibbon, Zara Worth, and Simon Ringe
We are attaching a presentation proposal and image on behalf of Five Years members involved in the Five Years correspondence project. We were excited to learn of the drawing symposium opportunity you are organising as a platform for us to share our work. Please let us know if you have any questions about our proposal. We hope this is of interest to you and look forward to hearing from you. Kindest regards, Five Years: Correspondence project / Jhinuk Sarkar, Carol Mancke, Edward Dorrian,
Ilga Leimanis, Sally Morfill, Rochelle Fry.
Proposal for Drawing Articulations Symposium
Presentation Proposal by FIVE YEARS Correspondents [500 words]:
Play is not something that happens in the mind…. It is not a subjecting act or attitude, but is…an activity that always goes on in-between the players and reaches beyond the behaviour or consciousness of any individual player. Play has a life, essence, or spirit of its own that emerges from the players’ engagement in their to- and-fro rhythm. The first iteration of the Five Years Correspondence Project (May 2023 - March 2024) quietly hummed along in the background of our lives for the best part of a year. With a nod to the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse method, it constituted a series of playful exchanges through a remote form of drawing with others. Every so often that quiet hum hit a crescendo – a moment of joy and surprise – on the arrival of a ‘gift’ through the post. Each ad-hoc package circulated through the group contained a drawing initiated by one of the eight participants. Sparking a series of cumulative visual correspondences, each recipient acted upon these in a random order determined by the original sender. Unlike the back and forth of written correspondence between two, the drawings could only move forward through the list of names. Without prior knowledge of the drawings’ meanings, no rules beyond the size of the envelope, each improvised addition, abstraction, disruption, or deconstruction became individual responses to a gift received, then gifted anew. The results, exhibited at Five Years in March 2024, is a collective work that, in theory, is free of the limitations we face as individuals, from varying positionalities and intersections of experiencing the world.
As part of this symposium, we intend a second iteration of the Correspondence Project. The exchanges will take place over a single day, and will expand to include all symposium participants interested in exploring notions of collective play and gifting in relation to drawing. We propose a two-part activity:
We will invite participants to engage in the interactive play of giving and receiving, bringing their own vocabulary of mark-making to a series of drawings that will infiltrate all areas of the symposium.
Towards the end of the day Five Years correspondents will facilitate a sharing of all the extensions / growths / reductions to the gifts, discussing how drawing articulates their journey and the people who have physically interacted with it.
A significant part of the project was the joy of receiving a ‘gift’ in the post, the surprise on opening the mail, as well as seeing what everyone did, the journeys our ‘drawings’ took to the end. In this way, our proposed intervention in this symposium is a way for us to fumble towards a more defined articulation of the ‘gift’, alongside our understanding of the sharing and community created.
Five Years: Correspondents’ biography [150 words]:
We are a part of Five Years, an artist-run organisation founded in 1998, with the initial aim of setting up a gallery where programming would maintain a direct relationship to practice.
Five Years continues to develop this aim by maintaining close links between the production and exhibition of work, and the discourse which informs it. Five Years presently has a membership of twenty contributors, each of whom may present two exhibition projects in the gallery every 18 months. Each contributor can choose to include their own work in one of these slots, but the other show must be purely invitational. Aside from these basic rules, each member acts autonomously in deciding the nature and content of their contributions to the exhibition programme. The creative freedom this structure allows operates like an engine, generating a continuous, rapid succession of new projects and continuously branching out into unpredictable territory, beyond the control of any individual directorship.