Contemporary Australian Drawing 3: Drawing as notation, text and discovery
Curator: Dr Irene Barberis 
August 11 - September 2, Exhibition opening event Saturday September 2nd, 2-5pm

After the successful Drawing Conference and exhibitions Crossing the Line, Drawing in the Middle East, in the UAE, Barberis collaborates once more with RMIT University and University of the Arts London in a major Drawing Project, this time curating over eighty of Australia’s most established artists in an exhibition titled Contemporary Australian Drawing: drawing as notation, text and discovery”, to be held in March 2012 at the ‘Drawing Out’ conference, London, a collaboration between University of the Arts London and RMIT University, Melbourne. At the same venue, the Australian High Commissioner will launch the Palgrave Macmillan publication ‘Contemporary Australian Drawing, Volume I’, commissioned by Dr Barberis through the International Research Centre, Metasenta® hub, and authored by prominent international art critic, author and Deputy Editor of Studio International, Dr. Janet Mackenzie. The exhibition and book looks like it will be travelling to New York and other venues in the USA, Europe and Asia during 2012/2013.

Each Artist was invited to respond to statements by French writers Michel Butor and Serge Tisseron, that ‘All Writing is Drawing’ and ‘The space of writing, what is this?’, and supplied with uniform scale and weight material to work upon. Mostly all exchanges of works travelled through the postal-system, were then packaged into two cloth boxes and transported to London in a suitcase. The mobility and transcontinental edge to the process of the exhibition’s development, is an essential ingredient in the wider purpose of this inter art/university dialogue between Australia’s indigenous and multicultural arts community (art works sent not only from all regions in Australia, but also China and Afghanistan) and their Northern counterparts. A tri-part curatorial rationale creates the infrastructure of the exhibition; Kinaesthesia and notation: the body in relation to the mark; keeping in mind contemporary Chorographer William Forsythe’s ‘movement drawings’ in his Improvisation Technologies. Global drawing and the porosity of the edge; the roots of cultural identities are challenged by contemporary mobility, knowledge transfers and extended language relationships. Loyalties to generational, national and familial heritages are clearly being tested in this time of globalisation. How have the artists, articulated and expressed their position, logically or intuitively through Butor and Tisseron’s statements.And finally ‘Infra writing’ and discovery; digitaltectonics, spatial innovation, methods and expanded resources inform much of our contemporary environment, ‘possibility’ thinking, and practice. The question is asked, “when considering ‘the space of writing/drawing’ and the modes and materials of production, are there created texts, neologisms and pictures which we could term ‘infra writings/drawings in the 80 works? And if so, what are they?

Contemporary Australian Drawing#3 follows the successful exhibition of 35 Australian Artists Contemporary Australian Drawing#1, which was exhibited at the RMIT Gallery for the Drawing Out 1 Conference, for University of the Arts, London and RMIT University in March 2010.

Global Centre for Drawing, February 2012 ©

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Contemporary Australian Drawing 2; Drawing as notation, text and discovery
University of Arts, London, Installation Shot 
March 2012
© Global Centre for Drawing

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