The Drawing Board
The Drawing Board was a space for handwritten performances that aims to turn a corridor into a destination and to return the walls of an old school building in Nottingham to their former use as a place of display.
The Drawing Board explores how we write, how we perform writing and how writing performs. Curated as part of the public programme of Primary Artist Studios in Nottingham 2013-2015.
Traci Kelly and Rhiannon Jones’ collaborative practice presents writing as a dynamic visual and lived encounter in a manner particularly suited to a gallery context. The work exemplifies artisitc research and is theoretically grounded in phenomenology, feminist and post feminist perspectives. It intentionally subverts and ruins the representation of writing in order to privilege the visceral and subjective production of the writerly.
The momentum of the work developed during a writing residency initiated by Nottingham based international artist and writer Michael Pinchbeck who invited the artists to first collaborate in October 2014 - present.
The residency and the continuation into exhibition is an investigation into the materiality of chalk and writing as a physicality of site and self. The artists have predominantly employed performance and performativity as a temporal mode of making works, which exist in the interstice of documentation, artwork and survey.
Their collaboration all plays with video installation and photographs along with developing sculptural works and the utilising of debris from gestures to creative seductive and fluid abstract surfaces.
These Inter-related works explore writing as object, writing as materiality, the process of writing through the body and the subject invention inherent in writing a subject into being.
An unedited sketchbook of the current body of writing investigations, from which several exhibition works are distilled, can be viewed within these pages.
Traci Kelly and Rhiannon Jones present writing as a dynamic visual and lived encounter. The work exemplifies artistic research and is theoretically grounded in phenomenology, feminist and post feminist perspectives. It intentionally subverts and ruins the representation of writing in order to privilege the visceral and subjective production of the writerly and resist the hierarchy of text.
Inter-related works span video installation, photography and artefact and explore writing as object, writing as materiality, the process of writing through the body and the subject invention inherent in writing a subject into being. The exhibition will include all of the previously mentioned video installation and photographs along with developing sculptural works and a four-panel work by artist Terry Shave who produced theKick and Kiss in response to witnessing the collaboration and utilising the debris from gestures to creative seductive and fluid abstract surfaces.
The artistic investigation brings into focus how we perform writing and how writing performs within broad cultural discourse.
Re:Calling is a collaborative work of the artists Traci Kelly and Rhiannon Jones, UK. Resisting the expectations off language, it forms part of a subversive investigation into writing as a visceral encounter and as an excavation of self and site – a mode of human extension into the world. The work is developed and made for the site, an old school staircase with chalkboard. It approaches writing and location as a site of subject invention, a place from where human relations develop cradled by institutionalised architectural and cultural values.
