11.00(BST) 27th May 2026

Tickets available here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/drawingresearchgroup/2210426

Polyphonic Lines is the second in a series of online events in collaboration with the Storytelling Academy at Loughborough University, which explore the relationship between Drawing and Storytelling. Drawing begins where words cannot reach, and storytelling begins when images ask to be read. This first panel brings together artists and researchers exploring the theme of narrated memories.

Isabel Herrera-González’s presentation Between Lines: Drawing and Visual Storytelling investigates the porous boundary between Drawing and Storytelling, asking how meaning is generated when image and narrative are no longer treated as separate systems but as interdependent acts of thought. The research question guiding this inquiry is: What can be made possible in the space where drawing and storytelling intersect? To address this, the project examines drawing as residue —of bodily movement, decision-making, and participation— and storytelling as an unfolding choreography of images that resists fixed interpretation. Meaning is understood as emergent and relational, produced through acts of reading, viewing, and participation rather than embedded in the work itself. The proposed presentation combines visual documentation, performative narration, and reflective analysis to introduce the participatory project Líneas de Vida (Life Lines). Through this work, storytelling is enacted through absence, incision, and flow, while drawing becomes a temporal event shaped by chance, voice, and encounter. The presentation will argue that drawing and storytelling share a mutual structure of unfolding and refolding, each carrying what the other cannot articulate. In doing so, the research reframes both practices as co-creative, living processes that activate the space between sign and meaning as a site of possibility.

Simon Grennan’s presentation Unexpected storytelling in algorithmic drawing researchasks the question, how can rule-based procedures generate new storytelling spaces in contemporary drawing? When Grennan began focusing on rule-based procedures (algorithms) within his drawing practice, he had two main goals in mind. One was to generate new kinds of drawing. Grennan’s ambition was to ‘return’ algorithms, now synonymous with digital computing, to an embodied material practice that, unlike much rule-based art, engaged with representation, perception, and the world at large. The second goal, made more urgent as the covid epidemic hit, was to blur the usual distinctions between artist and public, creating and exhibiting, private studio and public display – to facilitate creative collaborations and public participation. 

While conversation was an expected byproduct of this evolving project, Grennan had not considered storytelling as a significant or intentional outcome. Storytelling nevertheless become an important emergent feature. As the capacity of algorithmic thinking to structure and facilitate co-creation led to audience engagement, this engagement lead in turn to drawing designs that folded in both demographic and site specific data. That in turn led to new drawing events that functioned as a kind of hand-made data visualisation in which participants were given agency over how their data was collected, shared, and presented. Narratives in these participatory experiments then, were not derived from pre-authored content but emerged as participants engaged fluidly with the artist, with each other, and with the drawings-in-progress.  Storytelling behaviours unfolding firstly in the form of verbal interactions between artists and participants at work and secondly through the aggregate accumulation of these marks which told broader collective stories captured in the drawing-artifacts. 

Thomas-Bernard Kenniff’s and Carole Lévesque’s presentation Unfolding Stories: Drawing as Multivocal Narratives suggests that drawing makes sense of the world by fostering the cocreation of stories. Drawing rests on the accumulation of traces, the transcription of codes and their decoding and recoding by others, and as such is tied to other actions of making sense together. Tracing or following a line is akin to telling, recounting, remembering or listening to a story. As such, the sense that drawing makes is not given but constructed. It is a process that shares much with the way narratives are built, in its crafting, its communication and its architectonics (Bakhtin). The spatial and temporal assemblies of drawing are, in fact, narrativeassemblies and relationships (De Certeau) that connect us to a deeper sense of being and belonging (De Toledo). More so than any other dimensions of drawing, these narrative assemblies have the capacity to organize, connect and relate. 

Using examples from their upcoming book on drawing and the imaginary of place (Bloomsbury), this presentation explores how a narrative understanding of drawing invites polyphony and thus implies the presence of difference and plurality. Drawings, in this sense, are cocreated stories. Kenniff and Lévesque focus on their respective drawing practices that each fosters a different understanding of place, their construction and evolution, their spatial and temporal dimensions, and the ways in which their depiction in drawing can create the semantic surplus (Pérez-Gómez) necessary to any world-making story. In looking between process, artefact and the world thus depicted they ask: can a drawing be read as an unfolding, multivocal story?  

The session will be chaired by Rachel Gadsden-Hayton.

Biographies

Born in 1996 in Spain, Isabel Herrera studied Fine Arts at the University of Seville, Spain, where she is currently pursuing a PhD in performance drawing. Since 2002, she has been a member of the Research Group HUM-1025: Creation, Graphic art, Aesthetic and Gender.

Simon Grennan is an artist, practice-led researcher, and educator. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and has work in numerous public and private collections throughout Australia. A Lecturer in Visual Arts at Deakin University Victoria, Grennan works across a range of disciplines, specialisating in painting, drawing, and printmaking. His research and practice also extends however into interdisciplinary collaboration, algorithmic processes, data visualisation, and participatory art.

Thomas-Bernard Kenniff and Carole Lévesque are professors in environmental design at the UQAM School of Design, Montreal and cofounders of the Bureau d’étude de pratiques indisciplinées (BéPI) focusing on hybrid research-by-design methods. Their work explores drawing as a means to investigate spatial and temporal dimensions of the built environment. They are the coeditors of Inventories (BéPI, 2021) and -in Drawing (BéPI, 2024), as well as the authors of the upcoming book Drawing and the Imaginary of Place to be published by Bloomsbury this year.