Drawing International Brisbane Symposium
Kicking off at the Gallery of Modern Art with a keynote address by Deanna Petherbridge, the Drawing International Brisbane (DIB), a brainchild of the new Griffith Centre for Creative Research, was off to a strong, thought-provoking start.
With a gentle, pleasing wit, Petherbridge pre-empted exactly which debates DIB would cover over its two days, three nights and ten exhibitions, musing whether the inclusion of not one but three keynote speakers would position them in a ‘good cop/bad cop’ situation. She was not far wrong. With Hannah Matthews’s address the following morning, theoretical battle lines were drawn between Petherbridge’s rigorously practice-led research and Matthews’s own contemporary take on the drawing discipline. With Barbara Bolt’s address on the final morning, taking a position somewhere between, a discourse between practice-led and theory-led research was firmly established, and appeared throughout the symposium. This was an excellent way of provoking healthy levels of thought and debate in DIB right from the outset, framing the symposium with the pertinent examination of what contemporary drawing is.
Anybody familiar with Petherbridge’s seminal text, the Primacy of Drawing, knows the author is astute, easily demonstrating a diverse and even-minded grip on the many theoretical and practical applications of drawing. Indeed, a keynote address entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Co-option of Drawing’, promised a symposium of challenging ideas and discourse. Petherbridge seemed intent on cautioning against various trends she had observed of late, notably including the unquestioning institutional inclusion of drawing based only in its contemporary popularity, or being, as she put it, ‘a sexy thing of the moment’. Observing a lack of knowledge of drawing and critical thinking that is still present, Petherbridge encouraged artists to ‘come