The article addresses subjectivity in relation to assessment of drawing as fine art practice within higher education contexts. How can we measure the quality of a drawing in contemporary fine art? What standards can one take recourse to, or use, to define boundaries and definitions
for excellence? The role of outsider art, and of art not produced or valorized within institutional norms, is an area of tension within academic contexts. Do we overly valorize rejection of norms and traditions, or to the contrary, do we create neo-conformism in the way we teach drawing within
fine art? This article asks to reconsider aesthetics as a potential way of redressing the need to build overarching standards and measuring codes, independent from agents and institutions that have become interested parties and stake holders: the curatorial function of museum and gallery,
market forces, Research Council and Arts Council. A more meaningful dialogue with different types of public needs to be sought, to redress criticism that contemporary arts practices are elitist and removed from the realities of everyday life.
This co-authored project report considers the polarity of the ephemeral (concept, memory, recollection) with the material aspect of creativity, as it manifests itself in the related yet complimentary practices of writing and drawing. The craft of drawing is complex and hybrid, more
akin to writing processes as a means of embodying and making physical through gesture, than many other art forms and processes that rely on material presence. Writing and drawing materialize memory, ideas and projective thought and attempt to manifest their transience. The joint project research
(Clarke|Rohr) was originally presented as a contribution to ‘Drawings of, Drawings by and Drawings with …’ chaired by Ray Lucas (Manchester University) for the conference Art, Materiality and Representation, Royal Anthropological Institution, SOAS/British Museum,
in June 2018. We are grateful for the opportunity to further evaluate and publish the progression of the project in this issue of DRTP. The idea for a collaborative drawing project that involves text|image translations was borne from conversations between Niamh Clarke and Doris Rohr.
Clarke perceived visual, structural and textual affinities between the modernist novel The Waves by Virginia Woolf and the drawings of waves by the Latvian American photorealist artist Vija Celmins. This prompted an experimental project: what type of textual responses might be found
in another’s drawing, and, in turn, what type of visual drawn image might be generated in response to a short text of creative writing? We decided to limit the postal exchange of material to three A4 drawings and three individual short excerpts of poetry or prose. It was agreed that
we would monitor our personal reactions, emotions and analysis of the process and store the responses via a shared digital platform (Google Drive). The project’s premise was to interrogate image and text relationships and the possibilities to translate or influence one through the other.
Our aim is to explore materiality and subject matter through drawing with a mediated sense of authorship.
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