Call for Contributions: Drawing Matters One Day Symposium July 14th 2017

Cultures of Making Research Group, School of Art, Design and Computer Science at York St John University .

Keynote speaker: Professor Anita Taylor, Director of the Jerwood Drawing Prize project and founder of Drawing Projects, UK.

Synopsis

The newly formed Cultures of Making Research Group is delighted to announce Drawing Matters, the first one day symposium in a programme of research events to be hosted by York St John University.

Since its resurgence in the early 1990s drawing has come to inhabit a central rather than a peripheral role within contemporary art. In many respects the strength of that position is an affirmation of what Christian Rattemeyer described in 2013 as the ‘ubiquity’ of the medium or, as Emma Dexter put it in 2005, that ‘to draw is to be human.’ Drawing has been thus credited with a sensuous materiality that has the capacity to tap and articulate the shared nature of human experience, rendering it a powerful tool for social engagement in the arts.  This one day event seeks to interrogate the ‘human’ potential of drawing and why it matters.  

Drawing Matters builds on The Prisoner Drawing Project, Scarborough (February, 2016) instigated by Tracy Himswell and which included works and events by Sally Taylor, Lucy O'Donnell, Kate Black and Andy Black. Its timing is very much indebted to the results of the EU Referendum in the UK and the Presidential Election in the US. The divisive outcomes of these events have been driven, to a significant degree, by the newsfeeds of social media. The algorithms employed by these platforms have been widely criticised for the means by which they predetermine the circulation and content of information, entrenching political positions, prejudice and individualism by playing on fear of the unknown and the other. In what has been dubbed the ‘post-truth’ era, difference is therefore hostage to powerful representations presented at the level of the abstract. Within the context of this virtual reality a case can be need for the necessity of more tangible means of social communication and engagement. 

Drawing Matters draws on scholarship in the fields of anthropology and New Materialism to explore the ways in which drawing’s social potentiality can be affirmed by and embedded within practice. If drawing is indeed ubiquitous then Drawing Matters asks, how might the physicality of drawing and its strategies of curation and dissemination intervene in this troubling field of socio-economic relations? As such Drawing Matters foregrounds a concept of drawing as a mode of encounter; a vehicle of what Tim Ingold (2016) has named ‘human correspondence.’ Contrary to the individualism and protectionism that dominates contemporary culture Ingold proposes an understanding of the inherently relational nature of subjectivity in which '“I” emerges as a question’ formed in and of the social. Drawing Matters asks what roles can the materiality of drawing play in the questioning of the 'I' and its formation via the ‘bundle of lines’ that inextricably binds us to others. 

Call for Contributions: Deadline Monday 15th May 2017 

Drawing Matters invites abstracts of no more than 250 words from artists, scholars and curators that propose traditional academic papers (20 minutes), poster presentations, short workshops and roundtable contributions. 

Contributions may reflect upon, but are not limited to, questions of becoming, belonging, difference, home, migration, otherness, empathy, ethnicity, sexual difference, social class and the non-human via practices that consider: 

•	The social potential of the sensuous material dimensions of practice
•	The potential of ‘not knowing’ as a means to promote social engagement 
•	Practices of curation and/or dissemination  
•	Site specificity and audience engagement 

Please submit abstracts via email with the subject heading 'Drawing Matters' with contact details by the deadline to Vanessa Corby [log in to unmask] and Lucy O’Donnell [log in to unmask]