ART & ITS AFTERLIVES: Drawing with Fugitive Materials is the second of three inter-connected group on-line exhibitions of works resulting from intensive, week-long drawing workshops. Led by Siân Bowen, AUB Professor of Drawing, each of these projects focuses on ways in which a work of art continues to resonate after its creation and moments in the ‘life story’ of an art object. Participants include AUB PhD, MA Illustration and MA Fine Art students, AUB alumni and guest artists.

 

ART and ITS AFTERLIVES: Drawing with Fugitive Materials explores both the creative potential and ethics related to employing fugitive materials in order to make drawings. (Definition of fugitive: "not fixed; not durable; liable to disappear or fall away; volatile; uncertain; evanescent; liable to fade"). A series of actions were employed to create the resulting artworks and included staining/oiling/polishing; dusting/sweeping; smearing/coating/ and damaging/destroying/distressing.

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Exhibitions such as 'Paper: Pressed, Stained, Slashed, Folded' (MOMA, New York, 2009) examined the visual power of fugitive, organic materials in the work of key artists: Joseph Beuys (Painting Version, 1976); Dorothea Rockburne (Oil Stain on Paper), 1972; John Cage (Wild Edible Drawing, 1990); Eva Hesse (Repetition Nineteen, 1967); Dieter Roth (Big Landscape, 1969), and Richard Long (Mississippi Mud Drawing, 1992). This interest extends to current artists such as Cai Guo-Quiang, Wolfgang Laib, Elizabeth Ogilvie and Anya Gallacio.

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ART and ITS AFTERLIVES: Drawing with Fugitive Materials brings a practice-led perspective not only to David Howes’ ground-breaking ideas on the "multiple ways in which culture mediates sensation" and also explores debates on the dilemmas that are posed by the conservation of artworks whose ephemerality is integral to their identity and conception.

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The on-line exhibition of works from the first in the series, ART & ITS AFTERLIVES: Would You Trust a Stranger with Your Artwork? can be found here.

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Click here for the on-line exhibition of works from the third in the series, ART & ITS AFTERLIVES: Extraordinary Plumbago

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