Receive Drawing. Draw Drawing. Gift Drawing

Hosted at Leeds School of Arts Leeds Beckett University (LSA)
Wednesday 26 June 2024.

Receive Drawing. Draw Drawing. Gift Drawing.
Five Years Correspondence Project:
Jhinuk Sarkar, Carol Mancke, Edward Dorrian, Ilga Leimanis, Sally Morfill

Drawing Articulations: a Radical Drawing Symposium.
hosted at Leeds School of Arts Leeds Beckett University (LSA)

On the 26 June 2024, we travelled to Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University (LSA) for ‘Drawing Articulations: a Radical Drawing Symposium,’ to present a participatory provocation around the idea of the gift. In May 2023, Ilga initiated the Five Years Correspondence Project inviting Five Years to collaborate on a mail art drawing project, which ‘hummed along in the background of our lives over the best part of a year. Every so often that quiet hum hit a crescendo – a moment of joy and surprise – on the arrival of a ‘gift’ through the post.’ This first collaborative round was exhibited at Five Years in March 2024.

As a next step, Five Years Correspondents Ilga Leimanis, Jhinuk Sarkar, Carol Mancke, Edward Dorrian, and Sally Morfill proposed a new provocation responding to a call for the Radical Drawing Symposium. The proposal “Receive Drawing. Draw Drawing. Gift Drawing” introduced the fifty or so symposium attendees to the project and invited everyone to take part over the course of the day-long conference. Organiser Dr Joanna Leigh (Leeds Beckett University) gave them time at the beginning of the day to introduce the project and hand out sheets of paper folded in prepared envelopes, encouraging all attendees to draw something or do something to the paper, put it back in the envelope and give it to another person at the conference. They invited everyone to engage in a collective interplay of giving and receiving, using their own vocabulary of mark-making. A drawing in and into all aspects of the symposium.

‘It was a joy for us to participate in this new version of the project, as well as see our envelopes and drawings worked on, and handed person to person during the day in the parallel sessions and break times of the conference. At the end of the day, we put all the drawings on the floor and took time to look at them, people pointed, laughed or shared a memory.’

After the symposium they proposed a call to publish, inviting everyone who engaged in a collective interplay of giving and receiving, and who contributed to a series of loose-leaf drawings, to allow these drawings to be collated as black & white facsimiles into a bound publication, anonymously. The plan, a drawing book to be accessed by anyone. The proposed intervention in the symposium is a way to draw a shared articulation of ‘gift’, that questions the participants understanding of the risk involved in constituting any ‘collectivity’ ‘community’ and ‘drawing’.