DRAWING

Drawing underpins all art disciplines. Drawing is a cross-cultural impulse – every culture developed its own line and mark-making traditions, each with its own visual language and vocabulary.

Indigenous Australian sand drawings, mapping country; East Asian calligraphy, with gestural brushwork; Islamic tradition, with geometric and cosmological systems; African line patterning and texture, with symbolism; Western abstraction and the analytical expression of line, emerged (among others) as historical methods and processes in drawing, in ongoing conversations.  

DRAWING AS ANOTHER LANGUAGE

Drawing is another language – a system for expressing perception, emotion and meaning through line, form and gesture.

Across multiple modes of Modernism throughout the world, drawing was elevated to a form of inquiry; a way to experiment with the potential in mediums, and engage in conceptual visual ideas. Drawing became an expanded field; line was freed from representation, narrative and formal conventions as the emphasis shifted to invention, innovation and originality in expression. Artists pursued drawing as an independent art form with its own agency.

CONTEMPORARY DRAWING

In Contemporary Art, drawing methods, processes, strategies and expressive qualities extend into space as wire, string, installation, digital line and performance.

The body in Modernist drawing was subjective; the body in Contemporary art is social, political, global. Drawing can be a mode of investigation into our personal, social and cultural realities, allowing our thinking or feelings to become visible. It can act as an encounter with the unknown and the ‘unfinished’ nature of drawing offers an open-ended approach. Contemporary drawing is an ongoing dialogue between the present and cross-cultural historical influences; drawing remains a central artistic process and a way to return to sustained attention and concentration in a world of visual noise and overstimulation.