DRAW Space is thrilled to present Briony Barr + Richard Briggs – CODE DUELLO: DRAWING / UNDRAWING.
Opening 6-8pm Thursday 16 October, CODE DUELLO: DRAWING / UNDRAWING presents an immersive, evolving installation that will traverse all interior surfaces of the gallery.
Artists Briony Barr and Richard Briggs invite the DRAW Space community to contribute to the simultaneous growth and deconstruction of two tape-based drawings. The work will be created using a mark-making rule-system communicated through custom playing cards. The drawings will be initially created by Briony and Richard, then continued at the opening event and throughout the four-week exhibition period.
The title CODE DUELLO references historic rules for fair duelling and plays with the idea that the two drawings are vying with each other.
Join the artists and DRAW Space community to celebrate and create. Exhibition runs until 5pm Sunday 9 November.
Tape from Tenacious Tapes @tenacioustapes
Exhibition soundtrack by composer Pat Telfer @pattelfer
Opening night wine by Famelia @famelia.wine
CALL OUT FOR DRAWING AGENTS
Briony and Richard are seeking volunteer agents to contribute to this drawing installation by adding tape marks in the DRAW space gallery. In this session we will collectively grow the two artworks before the exhibition opening. Tape is provided and no prior experience is required.
WHEN: anytime between 11am-5pm Wednesday 15 October 2025
EMAIL: info@drawspace.org to register your interest
Richard Briggs image: Alia Ardon @aliaardon
Briony Barr image: Yuchen Liu @bctmt
About the artists
Briony Barr
Briony Barr is a visual artist who uses process-based drawing (individual, collaborative, live, expanded) to explores ideas around structure, emergence and the effect of different boundaries and generative limits.
Based in Brisbane, she regularly collaborates with scientists, writers, musicians, dancers and groups of people on projects ranging from large-scale, participatory-drawings, to live-art and performance, to workshops, picture books and graphic novels.
Briony’s work has been presented in schools, libraries, festivals, conferences, galleries, music venues, museums and science institutions in Australia and internationally, including at the World Science Festival Brisbane, Chau Chak Wing Museum, State Library of Queensland, State Library of Victoria, Scienceworks Melbourne, RMIT Gallery, ArtPlay, Make It Up Club, Counihan Gallery, George Paton Gallery, Ipswich Art Gallery, Miscellania and TW Fine Art in Australia, Pierogi 2000, Flux Factory and the Santa Fe Institute in USA and the National Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art in Korea.
Briony Barr website and Instagram
Richard Briggs
Richard Briggs is an artist who loves drawing.
He has a particular interest in forming an understanding about what makes a place unique, and how this can translate into an artwork. Richard uses drawing to explore our surroundings, both urban and natural, bringing the viewer into a world of intrigue, curiosity, and calm. His line based artworks are experiential and carry a spatial quality derived from simplification of our often complex surroundings. Importantly, they also aim to tell stories about a particular place, it’s people and are community and site specific.
Richard has experience of working on public art projects with NSW based Councils such as the City of Sydney, the Inner West Council, and the Government of Victoria on a large-scale public artwork for the Level Crossing Removal Project in Melbourne. Richard has also recently collaborated with NSW Health Infrastructure to produce numerous wall drawings at the Acute Services Building, Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick.
He also has a background in architecture and is an experienced teacher and workshop facilitator, leading drawing workshops both locally and internationally.
In every project community, stories of place and the landscape are celebrated.
CODE DUELLO: DRAWING / UNDRAWING
A conversation between collaborating artists Briony Barr + Richard Briggs
What do you like most about drawing?
Briony: Drawing is an immediate way to think and capture ideas. I like how it can be as simple or as sophisticated as you need it to be.
Richard: Drawing is universal and it’s also a way to form a connection with people. It’s a language in its own right. It slows you down—it makes you look.
Briony: It really is a language, an accessible language. Everyone has an experience of drawing and of mark making from an early age, even though they might not have continued with it. I also agree it’s a way to slow down and pay attention.
What is the difference between making a drawing on your own and making it with a group?
Briony: When I make a drawing on my own, it feels like I have more control and I can practice being in the present. It's about my own headspace.
When I work with a group of people, I have a lot less control and there’s more to consider in the design of the experience. I often set up creative parameters (e.g. drawing space, medium, duration, sometimes a theme) and frequently prescribe a certain kind of mark making and rules for interaction. But, after that, it really is about allowing things to emerge through the process.
I don’t work with groups of people because I want to create a specific outcome or visual. I am interested in how social dynamics and other factors and parameters feed back into the collaborative drawing and change it.
Richard: When I'm drawing on my own, I’m totally immersed in that particular moment. Whereas when I work with a group, I try to design a framework with enough opportunity for people to feel comfortable and express themselves or even take it in a direction I may not have envisaged.
A really great thing about working with a group is that it can be quite powerful. Whenever you finish up, everyone is on cloud nine. People feel part of a collective. I think that's a sign of a successful creative framework.
So how did you come to use tape in your work?
Richard: I started using tape because I was thinking about how to deal with scale in my work and how to cross different types of surfaces. I was considering how to be more ephemeral and how to integrate into architecture and the streetscape.
Using tape forced me to be incredibly simple about which lines I select. I found it hard to add any detail at all, which is unlike most of my other drawing.
I remember doing a mural and using painter's tape to set out the mural and then realising I could use the tape line in a completely different way.
Briony: During my Bachelor of Fine Arts (2004), I started to get into spatial drawing—mostly using wool to make lines. But it wasn’t until my Master of Fine Arts (2007-8) that I really started to experiment with tape to make spatial, durational and site-specific drawings and undrawings.
When my first opportunity came to draw on a much larger scale and with groups of people (at ArtPlay, a civic art studio in Melbourne), colourful tape felt like the logical medium. I’ve been working with it ever since and have two long term collaborative tape drawing projects: Tape It! and Drawing on Complexity.
Richard: Using tape is exciting for people because it’s familiar but they've maybe never thought to draw with it.
Briony: Everyone has used tape, but they haven't necessarily used it to its full potential. Which is kind of like drawing—everyone has drawn, but have they really explored what drawing can be?
What are some of factors that will influence how the drawings in this exhibition will evolve?
Briony: People are being given quite specific prompts through the rule-cards we are creating, but they will have agency within this ‘code of conduct’. Drawing in a more social setting such as the opening event as opposed to a during regular gallery hours may also affect how the drawing develops.
Since there will be two drawings, there may be a sense of competition between them. One may evolve faster or ‘survive’ more effectively somehow. People may connect to one of the drawings over the other and invest in it more. And there will be chance involved in what card you draw from the deck, as well the option to keep going and action more than one card.
Richard: I think it’s also whether people are brave in terms of where they place their marks, which comes back to that question of designing a creative framework that people feel comfortable within. If many people follow each other then mark making could become concentrated in one or two areas. What will help the drawings expand is people working in different parts of the space so then it starts to really take over in an immersive way.
But the exciting thing about it is that you just don't know.
Briony: We're also going to have a soundtrack (composed by musician Pat Telfer) created using tape rips as the main sound sample: one fast, one slow. This may influence how people feel or move in the space.
In the exhibition proposal, you describe the drawings as ‘embodying structure over time’. What does this mean?
Briony: We are presenting a drawing that grows over the course of the exhibition and we want to see how this structure evolves within the gallery parameters. You and I are setting a system in motion and seeing what emerges over time. And we're also observing what happens when this system is simultaneously deconstructed as well.
Richard: Going back to the material, the nature of tape is that it is temporary.And when I think about the drawing growing and being deconstructed and the people involved, it speaks to me about the fragility of environment, of community, of place. One minute it's there, the next minute it's not. And it's up to us to nurture that in a respectful way. I think there's a nice analogy there about the fragility of life.
The drawing has an expiry date, like the lifespan of a tree, or a person or a building. I think that's what I'm really excited by. How can this embodied structure encourage people to think about the fragility of things.
Briony: That’s another interesting thing about a collaborative drawing as an analogy. Do people care for it? Do they value the goal or the rules behind it?
There’s a set of ethics implicit in making something together, and in the deconstruction too. We will be asking people to rip off what other people have done (which we call ‘undrawing’). Is it done with care and respect? Because I think it absolutely can be.
As you say, all things have lifespan, but there's only ever certain amount of energy in the world. Over time, structures become other structures. And I think there’s a sense of that in the relationship between the drawing and the undrawing process.
What is the relationship between the exhibition, the gallery and the street?
Richard: DRAW Space gallery has quite a strong presence on the street. It's a big, beautiful, glass shopfront.
Good public space is where you encourage people to stop and linger, as opposed to moving from A to B as quickly as possible. And while the footpath outside the gallery is quite narrow, people walking past everyday will be able to pause and glance at this evolving structure. Even though it's all internal within the gallery, it will still have a visual connection and relationship with the public space. Not everyone will enter or contribute to the exhibition but there’s an interesting potential there for this artwork to psychologically and socially reach outside the gallery walls.
Briony: Yes the drawing will be right up against that threshold between the gallery and the street. Potentially it will grow all over the walls, the floor and probably the windows too.
Working within the physical limits and practical parameters set by DRAW Space are part of what shaped the idea and timeline for this work, and the willingness of the gallery to be treated as a surface.
I’m really fascinated with how boundaries affect a drawing process. It could be as simple as a rectangular piece of paper and a time limit of 10 minutes. I find parameters and limitations are very generative in that they can shape a system in a fundamental way.
Richard - When I do my tape drawings in the street, I often don't see any boundaries at all which is really liberating. It’s also about what is possible with scale. I don't have to think about all this fitting on a piece of paper. Sometimes it's just limited to how far you can reach.
But I think in this exhibition, creating the drawings in this contained way generates more tension with the external context.
Briony - I like the containment. The work will live and die in the gallery.
Thank you to Jill Farrar for her help with editing.