Felt-Map: Wingham and Taree,

DRAWSPACE, NSW, Australia, 2024.

Curated by Melinda Hunt.

Exhibiting Artists:

Alexandra Crosby, Ilaria Vanni, Sarah Jane Jones and Holly O’Neil, Melinda Hunt, Luca Idrobo, Linda Knight, Kiera O’Toole, Mia Salsjö

DRAW Space presented Group Show / WALK WITH ME, an exhibition by nine artist-researchers who use walking as a deliberate strategy to reveal and disseminate new knowledge. 
Once the primary mode of transport, part of the continuum of human history, walking in the First World is now consciously chosen, an act of resistance against loss of time, space and embodiment. Since the 1960s, when art transitioned from object-making to an investigation of ideas, valuing process over product, opportunities arose for the artist to see the body as a medium and walking as an ordinary activity from which the extraordinary can be derived.
Curated by walking artist, Melinda Hunt, WALK WITH ME will present six projects that foreground preoccupations with and responses to habitat loss and species extinction, connection with urban ecologies, the colonial project, artistic and scientific activity centred on walking, and site-specific atmospheres, among other concerns. Each project generates drawing as an output. To find out more about individual projects, read the artist statements below. Melinda Hunt
www.drawspace.org

Essay Abstract by Lia



”Emotive qualities of spaces and places are the subject of Kiera O’Toole’s field research; where she draws gesturally, in-situ, and fascinatingly, to prolong a lingering first impression. This experienced phenomenological character of a place is something we can all probably relate to but will find difficult to articulate. O’Toole emphasises the pathic and embodied action of drawing as a process receptive to both place and drawer, even developing a vocabulary to attempt to verbalise this unutterable, through terms such as DiSp (drawing in space), spatialised feelings and felt maps. For this exhibition, O’Toole’s gestural drawings are expanded to include a range of experimental documentation made over multiple stays in Taree and Wingham, in country NSW.”