Action/Assemblage: Drawing Together
The weather forecast lied. The galleries of the Royal West of England Academy were pretty quiet on the Saturday afternoon of one of the few gloriously sunny bank holidays in living memory. This did not bode well for the first of the two Research to Public events I had been busily planning. Action/Assemblage: Drawing Together was scheduled as one of the activities running through the RWA’s Drawn exhibition. It was designed as an interactive visitor experience, and it wouldn’t work without visitors.
I was relying on a host of folks to help the event along. The most important members of the cast were Richard Carter and Paul Scott who had agreed to perform the poetic works they had created in the visual-gestural medium of British Sign Language. Then there were the interpreters, Pascale Moroney and Naomi Bearne, without whom the Signartists and visitors would not be able to communicate. Finally there were the members of the research-through-drawing collective HATCH who had volunteered to lead the graphic responses to Richard and Paul’s work, and Alice Hendy who was to record the event with her camera.
After arriving to arrange the Drawing Lab space far too early, and sweating through the superfluous empty minutes supported by my partner who had generously elected to lend a hand, the cast began to arrive. Fifteen minutes before the start of the event we were all assembled. All that was missing was a ‘public’. ‘Assemblage’, but not yet ‘Action’…
But I needn’t have worried. Once the Signartists began to perform, their movements conjured visitors into the space as if by magic.
The Drawing Lab quickly filled. What’s more, the visitors didn’t leave. Most stayed for the entire two hours of the event. As an inveterate wimp (see my first blog on this subject), the bravery of others never ceases to impress and I was bowled over by the readiness of casual visitors to engage with drawing practice. They drew, they wrote haikus, they asked questions, they made comments and appreciative noises, and observed long intense silences while Richard and Paul performed, and I scribed provocative quotes on the blackboards. And as the event drew to a close and artists and visitors mingled and chatted, the voluntary contributions box began to fill with drawings, comments and even a number of haikus!
The success of the event was all the more rewarding because the whole was designed as a performance of the activity of my doctoral research. I’m looking at image in sign language poetry, and asking whether analysing this ‘Signart’ through art epistemologies can offer a greater understanding of the form than purely linguistic or literary analysis permits. So Richard and Paul were performing the subject of the research, the visitors were performing the research practice by drawing, thinking, writing and commenting, whilst I was performing academia by relating all of these to existing knowledge.
It seemed to work. I can only hope my thesis will be as well received. And perhaps the brightest planning idea – which came from Gemma Brace, the curator at the RWA – was to run the event twice. This offers the opportunity for ‘rewrites’ and ‘corrections’. The first event put a lot of pressure on the Signartists to perform continuously, whilst the position of the blackboards meant the content of my work could easily have been overlooked by visitors. In short, the three activities of the model were performed but could perhaps have interacted with each other more fully. At the next event, in a few weeks’ time, I’ll punctuate the Signartist’s performances by reading the statements I am writing and so help the visitors’ ‘research’ activities to be informed By the ‘academic’ content. I hope the turn out and the responses will be as satisfying.
I enjoyed the experience enormously!I can’t tell you how fascinating I found the event.
I’m an artist. I’ve lived in Bristol for six years and this is the first event that has attracted me to the RWA.
It was really moving, and incredibly inspiring and thought provoking!
Fascinating.Where is the line drawn?
I have never seen sign poetry before, and I didn’t even know it existed
Brilliantly expressive and strong. Mesmerising!
Wow! Really interesting challenge.
Haiku: with eye, hand, lip a concentration of movement understanding will come soon Yes