Drawing Connections: Collaborative Practices

Woven throughout my pedagogical and studio practice lies a persistent curiosity in the relationship between drawing and collaboration. In the studio and classroom, I instrumentalize traditional and experimental drawing processes as catalysts for reflecting and connecting students, audiences, ideas and materials. In recent projects including HERE/US/NOW and Starts & Stops, I provide a textual prompt to which gallery visitors respond, thereby creating layers of visual conversations on the wall. On the first day of a class meeting, I usually commence the semester with a collective drawing exercise. I collaborate with my family members to create drawings and translate them into other forms. Whether taking the form of takeaway poster, collaborative wall mural, byproduct of a physical movement or graphite rendering, drawing is an expansive site for inquiry, a verb that hovers between modes, often refusing to be one thing. Drawing encourages us to ask questions. How might drawing act as a translation between ideas? In what ways can drawing function when activated as a collaborative act? How might drawing operate as an expansive, radical creative practice?