Drawing via Dialogue: Brighton and Nagoya

‘Drawing as Dialogue’ is a research project that was conceived, organised and curated by Masahiro Suda (Nagoya University of Art) and Duncan Bullen (University of Brighton) as a means to develop dialogue through drawing between academics from two universities who have had a long standing student exchange programme, but have not collaborated, until now on artistic research.

Working in pairs with drawings sent back and forth between Japan and UK, the project featured ten participants; five from Nagoya University of the Arts and five from the University of Brighton. John Berger’s notion that ‘drawing is an act of discovery’, is seen in this context, as a means of analysing and responding to drawings made by artists from a different pictorial tradition, to explore each others interests, aesthetic, cultural conventions and habits of artistic practice. For each participant the notion of giving and receiving was central to the challenge of understanding the productive choices (methods and materials) that artists make in the production of drawings. How to visually respond generously, and with respect, while simultaneously developing and challenging with a new drawing, that in turn would be responded to, was crucial to this project. Drawing is seen here as a visual methodology for collaboration and communication between colleagues who do not share a common spoken language, yet nevertheless are invited to engage in alternative channels of communicability through the development and discovery of visual mark making and the questioning of assumed knowledge.

A total of 30 drawings were produced, which equated to 6 drawings per dialogue, each drawing was no larger than A4.

The first iteration of this project was exhibited at Nagoya University of the Arts in 2016 and again at the University of Brighton as part of Marks Make Meaning: drawing across disciplines in March 2018.