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Curator Emma Bugden managed to cover a range of moods, styles and media within this exhibition’s stated focus on personal gestures through drawing and performance. Each medium implicates the other: drawings as documented performance or action; and performances as drawings made with the body in space-time.
Mei Cooper’s floor work in wine was—as a sticky residue—a simple example of a drawing which implies its maker’s past gesture, while the watercolour nudes of the artist were a multifaceted exploration of life-drawing. The latter piece was a collaboration with the artist’s partner—filmmaker, Mark Burrows—who photographed her in various poses which manipulated the line tattooed across her back. Here, a line, the most basic component in drawing, was performed with the body and travelled through many different media before it reached us as the watercolour reproductions of Burrows’s shots. Yet another facet to this work was revealed through knowing that the tattoo, which is a tribute to a work by Santiago Sierra, was done by the artist before she met Burrows. This was one of the most intensely personal, revealing works in the show, but remained relatively comfortable viewing, due perhaps to the layer of studied removal afforded by the lens.
This dynamic, of sincerity interrupted or challenged by the nature of display, could be felt at a range of temperatures throughout the show.
Trenton Garratt’s performed work, Model Conversations: The Last Days of a Famous Mime, was named after a short story by Peter Carey, which the artist read to Sunday gallery-goers. The Last Days… is a tale of life and art in conflict and confusion: the mime’s lovers suspect him of ‘merely miming love’—as the mime looked for ever more