Choral Drawing Project #1

A collaborative drawing project involving 40 participants

40 Graphite on paper drawings with embossed approval stamp, custom portfolio, framed certificate

mima

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK,

2014

Customs House Gallery

South Shields, UK

2015

Choral Drawing Project #1 was a participatory drawing project, developed and led by Nick Kennedy throughout 2014. The project proposed a game, with a strict set of rules, which a group of 50 people were invited to respond to. Each participant made a formal agreement with the artist and carried out the instructions provided by him to produce a drawing.

The resulting collection of drawings was presented at Customs House, South Shields as a large scale work for the first time and for the duration of the exhibition only, before they were returned to their makers. Through this period of exhibition the collection of drawings will be seen as a chorus of individual voices, responding to the artist’s instruction.

The drawing instructions have been developed from those used by the artist in the production of his series of Dice Drawings. In these drawings a die is rolled repetitively, sometimes many thousands of times, at a target on the paper and its resting point recorded with a handwritten number. Here, each participant rolled the die continually until 4000 rolls had been recorded, at which point the drawing was complete.

The project seeks to explore the chance elements – and beauty – related to individually within a system. Just like our handwriting, or fingerprints, each drawing provides a unique reference to self and through a unifying, measured process, our similarities and differences, failures and successes are exposed.

NICK KENNEDY

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