Second-Hand: tracing performative responses through drawing and archiving

This Fellowship will explore the relationship between drawing as a form of evidence to capture the fleeting dynamics of social relations and co-authorship that take place in participatory practices.

The research takes as its starting point an interest in the potential of art to be a social as well as a creative contract between artists, collaborators and audiences, beyond the traditional role assigned to artists and their relationship to making art.

These collaborative works come out of unrehearsed and improvised situations that I orchestrate with other people. The performative encounters produce an abundance of documentary material, and this growing collection of 'performance relics' now requires an organising structure. My aim is to develop a manageable archive and utilise these documents as a studio-based practice, and as the basis for making drawings. The drawings that come out of these encounters mimic strategies of documentation, where I copy or trace texts or images that emerge during the process of the participation.

Whilst building on existing work, this Fellowship will represent a new departure by bringing into focus the antagonisms and creative forms of risk that takes place in collaborative work, and as such, there are ethical issues that arise that have to be addressed. These include providing an understanding amongst participants of the extent of their involvement, and their inclusion in the final outcome; identifying and clarifying where ownership and copyright resides; and sometimes, dealing with conflict during a participatory encounter. A significant part of my research will look at the debates and practices that have recently sprung up around the subject of art and social interaction. My aim will be to question the philanthropy that underlies this practice, often assuming that it is beneficial to the recipients, or that creative agency is a one-way channel that originates from the artist to the participants. However, what is often concealed by this kind of debate are the complex power relations and questions of ownership and authorship.

To delve deeper into these questions of the politics and poetics of social interaction as art, I shall take up an invitation by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, to join the Blue House in IJburg; a recently developed residential area built on a cluster of man-made islands on the outskirts of Amsterdam. At the heart of this growing residential area Heeswijk has initiated an experimental community of artists, architects, thinkers and scholars to actively help shape the cultural dialogue between inhabitants of Block 35 and the emerging community.

The Centre for Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art will provide an excellent host for my Fellowship and it will enable me to explore the relationship between collaboration and drawing. Through an engagement and discussions with colleagues, it will be my first opportunity to consider this practice within an academic framework, and to ask what status drawing might occupy within this 'relational' context. The Project Space at the Centre for Drawing is an appropriate setting for the collaborative encounters and a suitable context for developing my ideas on copying and tracing.