Abstract
In this study, I analyse portrait drawing as a public art intervention and the dialogical relationships which are created between sitter, artist and artwork. I aim to understand the ways in which these portraits come to embody subtle layers of relational affect and how, through the artist’s facilitation of agency in their participants, these drawings might communicate such affects and agencies beyond their making.
I do this through a phenomenological analysis of portrait-making in selected studio works of Joni Brenner. I then analyse Portrait Exchange (2015), an interventive artwork by Anthea Moys, from the perspective of the sitter. My focus on portraiture practices aims to unpack how the relationship between artist and sitter is embodied in the portraits, without focussing upon any naturalistic likeness. Thus, in this study, I explore processes through which the artwork becomes an agentic body in the encounter between sitter and artist.
I then analyse my own interventive portraiture artwork, created during multiple Drawing Sessions, before, during and after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I then explore how I transform, translate and transgress the original agentic, and dialogical portrait drawings through an intensely focussed and private set of redrawings, restichings and transformations of these dense objects into artists’ books and a paper-based sculptural installation. These books and the sculptural installation constitute the practical component of the study. My transformations and translations of the original portrait drawings transgress and transcend their status as singular static objects that merely document past drawing moments. In this way, the reworked portrait drawings are able to embody a movement through time and space, whilst reasserting new affective agencies, between artist, artwork and viewer.