We just sent out a survey by e mail to all past and present Circlers. We would really appreciate your responses. We are writing a chapter about the Circles for a book on collaborative drawing. This is the survey.
Please e mail brewdrawingcircles@gmail.com if you have not received it by e-mail and are willing to complete the survey.
Thank you!
October 2016
| Participant approaches and issues | Comments |
| Rules – requesting or assuming rules | |
| Reluctance to draw on some else’s drawing | |
| Objections to membership or inclusion: people outside the circle or children contributing | |
| Issues of ownership; ‘my book’, or wanting to control the circle, wanting ‘their book’ back at the end of the cycle | |
| Issues of control: lack of control, sensations of loss when the book moved on or a drawing was reworked or obliterated, and anxiety around control and ownership, instructions left for others e.g. ‘do not draw on this page’ notices, upset participants when books got lost or failed to arrive on time | |
| Participants who did not wish to work on others’ drawings and continued in their own style with their own pre-occupations | |
| Communication: easier in smaller groups | |
| The value ascribed to the book and project by the participant | |
| Issues of privacy: the use of drawing books to explore the emotional, feelings of vulnerability and the confessional |
| The visual qualities of images within the books
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| The offering of ‘gifts’ to other participants: open ended speculative advances or questions posed that can be responded to in many ways | |
| Messages of appreciation: e.g. ‘I love this drawing’ | |
| Text used: as description of objects and images, as text and image, as poetic enigma | |
| The development of shared imagery and/or narratives between pairs or groups of participants | |
| The use of pictorial framing devices by individuals in an attempt to protect drawings from being reworked by others | |
| Issues of isolation manifest by books in which no clear conversation takes place, consisting of pages with unconnected drawings | |
| Submerging images made by others: e.g. burying imagery under pattern, collaging over drawings | |
| Materiality: cutting spaces through sheets of paper, creating doors and windows | |
| Challenging the format and notion of the book: adding paper to alter formats, denial of access by closing down the space of the book e.g. gluing all the pages together | |
| Visual and conceptual clashes: ugly versus pretty, conceptual versus decorative, provocative interventions aimed at exploring clashes of thought and value systems | |
| Storytelling: over a number of consecutive pages, or throughout a book or from book to book | |
| The unexpected: images that could only have been generated by two people coming together, surrealist humour | |
| Playing with the 3 dimensional aspects of the books by adding found objects such as a turntable, paint brushes, a reading light or a bag | |
| Working all over and all through a book to unify it | |
| Duration / time phased approaches |
Any other comments:
brewdrawingcircles 