Paper short abstract:

This paper considers ways in which a performed drawing practice serves as a catalyst for social engagement. The paper will contextualize iterations of a drawing practice performed by Shepley over the past three years and will focus particularly on varying aspects of a 'drawing as' a spatial practice

Paper long abstract:

Abstract: This paper considers ways in which a performed drawing practice, in the form of architectural contouring, can serve as a catalyst for social engagement. The paper will contextualize iterations of a drawing practice performed by Shepley over the past three years and will focus particularly on varying aspects of a 'drawing as' a spatial practice. Citing projects which reimagine neglected sites in order to rediscover a city's cultural and artistic potential through imaginative transformations, the paper will discuss drawing as a means of encounter; a method of speculative enquiry relating art to everyday practices; a means to prolong the notion of artistic activity; a way of promoting a more socially engaged practice; a form of occupation within the field of distribution; activism and game playing; dispersal and provocation; ambivalence, uncertainty and delayed closure.

The paper examines ways in which drawing as a performed series of actions within a public space can help to disclose potential breaches in the cultural infrastructure. The paper will explore creative work that attempts, as Marcel Duchamp once wrote, to be not of art, and to delay closure - that closure being the co-opting of art by the institutions that define art as art and that have traditionally distributed it. The paper will establish how such projects are part of a broader tendency highlighting the potential of creative indeterminacy to, push away from 'art' and to restore an embodied relationship to the world.