11.00-13.00 (BST) Wednesday 23 April 2025

Tickets: https://buytickets.at/drawingresearchgroup/1604297

This panel brings together artist-researchers exploring aspects of emergence within the theme of drawing negation.

Kelly Cumberland’s presentation, Drawing the Invisible: Negation, Serendipity, and Transformation in Expanded Drawing and Neuroscience, will explore how expanded drawing, informed by collaboration with neuroscientists, investigates the interplay between negation, absence, and serendipity. Drawing operates as a process of translation and transformation, engaging with raw scientific data—such as cellular behaviours and molecular changes—to create speculative visual forms that challenge traditional perceptions of the internal body. The research considers the following questions: How can the concept of negation, understood as absence or fragmentation, serve as a generative force in drawing practice? How can accidental or unintentional moments, such as condensation on petri dishes or fragmented imagery, lead to transformative expanded drawing insights?

Central to this exploration is the tension between the visible and the invisible, the intentional and the accidental. Through iterative processes of layering, projection, and fragmentation, the work investigates the “spaces between,” disrupting binary distinctions of positive and negative space. This interdisciplinary practice highlights drawing as a dynamic act of becoming, where mark and surface engage dialogically to make the unseen visible. The presentation examines how serendipity and failure within both scientific and artistic processes foster creative breakthroughs, resonating with the unpredictability of biological systems.

By reflecting on works such as Segmentation (2023) and Endothelial (2024), the presentation illustrates how drawing can function as a site of co-emergence and transformation, where negation becomes a tool for reimagining biological and artistic knowledge. Ultimately, this research proposes that drawing, in its expanded form, offers a unique method for investigating the relational spaces of negation, creativity, and interdisciplinarity.

Birgitta Hosea’s presentation, Touching the Void: ‘Erasure’ and ‘Holes, will use Erasure and Holes as case studies, to explore how negation and absence function as conceptual and material forces. The projects address invisibility of labour and lack of representation, drawing on Derrida’s notion of the trace—the fundamental mark of absence within presence.

Erasure is an exploration of the invisible and undervalued labour of domestic cleaning in which the act of erasure becomes generative. In performance drawing, animated installations and works on paper, domestic cleaning tools and products become integral parts of the drawing process—reinscribing the body’s labour and the space it occupies, even as the body itself is erased. Here, negation is not a mere absence, but a manner of both revealing and obscuring the body’s trace through its actions.

Holes, on the other hand, presents the hole as a portal—neither an absence nor a void, but a full, embodied presence. Using a ‘peepshow’ structure, the hole becomes an entryway into another dimension: the queer female body. Through a combination of animation and drawing, the hole emerges as a site of meaning and potential. In this context, the hole is not a lack, but a space rich with symbolic, sexual and political significance.

Both works position negation and absence not as opposites to presence, but as interwoven parts of a larger conversation about labour, sexuality and the body. Drawing, in this sense, becomes a site of differance, where presence and absence are always in flux. 

Garry Barker’s presentation, The Emergence of Distinction in the Visualisation of Interoception: Drawing as a Boundary-Making Act,will explore the parallels between the inception of drawing as a distinction between one thing and something else, the evolution of human territoriality, and the conceptualization of the universe’s origin. It argues that during workshops designed to help participants visualise interoceptual experiences; that it became important to develop an understanding of drawing as a primary act of distinction. Defining a somatic feeling is linked to the introduction of fundamental mathematical logic and biological processes observed in nature. By examining the philosophical underpinnings of Spencer-Brown’s ‘Laws of Form’ alongside the evolutionary context of boundary-making in animals, and the visualisation of embodied thinking through drawing, this presentation seeks to articulate how drawing reflects an intrinsic human impulse to mark territory and create meaning from the void of our own bodies. 

The presentation posits the significant parallels between the moment a drawing begins, the territorial nature of human and animal existence, and our understanding of the inception of the universe itself and that the mark making that lies at the centre of the act of drawing, is in its most elemental form, a distinction-making process. 

Using images made in response to the visualisation of interoceptual experiences, alongside images of mathematical set theory and animal territorial marking, the presentation will unfold relationships that are designed to illustrate how an evolution of signalling, from unicellular organisms to human art forms, reflects an intrinsic animal as well as material need to mark distinctions as we attempt to articulate our existence within the universe.

Biographies:

Kelly Cumberland

Kelly Cumberland is an artist, academic and postgraduate practice-led researcher at the University of Leeds. She is exhibiting and presenting nationally and internationally and is also an academic acquiring an extensive portfolio of teaching experience both at undergraduate and postgraduate level and has been lecturing since 2001. www.kellycumberland@me.com

Birgitta Hosea

Birgitta Hosea is a time-based media artist working with experimental drawing, performance and expanded animation. Professor of Moving Image at UCA, her publications include Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 (with Foá/Grisewood/McCall). Exhibitions include Venice & Karachi Biennales; Oaxaca & Chengdu MOCA; C4RD, London; ASIFAKEIL, Vienna; Hanmi Gallery, Seoul. www.birgittahosea.co.uk

Garry Barker

A Leeds Arts University research fellow, using drawing to visualise older people’s awareness of aging and other interoceptual experiences. He is also a member of ‘The Observation of Perception, Considered through Drawing’, research group hosted by the i2ADS research unit of Porto University’s Fine Art Faculty. https://garrybarkeronline.com/