Robbie Karmel / HEADBOWLS
DRAW Space is thrilled to present Robbie Karmel’s performance, HEADBOWLS.
7.00 pm – 8.30 pm Monday 2 September 2024
Headbowls is an ongoing project in which Robbie Karmel has made a series of turned segmented wooden bowls designed to be worn on the head and drawn on, printed from, modified, damaged, repaired, performed and reperformed. As participatory and performative objects the bowls are worn and drawn on collectively by the artist and audience. The Headbowls retain a build-up of marks over repeated performances and provide a matrix from which participants can take a monoprint of the collective drawing.
The Headbowls provide a meditative space to observe, consider, and respond to perceptual experience — the shape and senses of the body, the weight of the bowl, interactions with others, and the tangled activity of drawing. These objects are an invitation for social production of drawings that are ambiguous in their subject, object, author, and viewer.
The collective Headbowl performative drawing invites people to access their tacit embodied knowledge and capacity for mark-making and to collectively develop and share that understanding through the activity. These are also objects that are played with, drawn on, broken, fixed, modified, pulled apart, and put together again. This social, collective activity aims to be a panacea to alienation and isolation.
BIO
Robbie Karmel completed his PhD at UNSW A+D and returned to Canberra in 2019 to establish Studio Studio with Richard Blackwell. His research and practice explore concepts of mimetic representation, phenomenological embodiment, perception, tool use, and representation through expanded drawing practices, extending into printmaking, sculptural and performative methods. In his performative and participatory drawing works Karmel works with charcoal, oilstick and graphite on paper or timber surfaces, mapping out the body relying on the intermodal array of senses, challenging dominant opticentric modes of picture making. This work includes the production of studio furniture, apparatus, and tools to facilitate and interrupt solo and collaborative performative drawing processes.
Photography by Eva Nolan and Melinda Hunt
Visitors to the event were provided with a pamphlet that gave instructions for the use of the Headbowls and information about the artist and the theoretical concerns that underpin his practice.
