Workshop EXPERIMENTAL DRAWING by Emily Hunt

“The desire to represent the self is a primal instinct, an artist’s quest to convey the essence of human experience. A portrait is a likeness, and in looking back over the history of Renaissance portraiture one finds that likeness is not just an accurate recounting of surface detail. The best portraitists, such as Lucas Cranach the Elder, Jan van Eyck, and Raphael were able to convey the character of their sitters. They distorted what they saw before them to their advantage, accentuating physiognomic details – a long nose, wrinkles – in order to capture the nature of their subject.

DAY 1: The Psychogeograhic Industriebahn
Psychogeography is essentially the study of the ‚psychology of place’. Why are we drawn to certain places? How do certain places effect us in a profound way?
Be that positivity or negatively. The best real world example of a negative outcome is Hostile Architecture – examples being bars on windows, barbed wire on fences, and some bureaucratic places, like jails, airport security. This course will focus on an action or movement, something which we do everyday but usually in a state of unawareness. It is an exercise, a practice, a mode of thought. We can think of this exercise as being “Embodied Walking”. This is a constructive behaviour with an awareness of the effect the city is having on you. The Situationists – led by Guy Debord understood this emotional mapping of the city as a rebellious act against the urbanisation and gentrification of the city. We will be using the Industriebahn location as our source for mapping, locating significant personal responses to place. The lecture will cover the history of psychogeographical drawn and collaged maps, looking at contemporary drawing practice in particular. We will be creating a drawn map that reflects the experience of looking at the Industriebahn with new eyes and using this sense to reflect on our experience of being in the larger city of Berlin.

DAY 2: Asemic Writing and Automatic Ornaments
In this course will be using the free associations that were invoked when “filling the void” to further experiment with constructed languages. Asemic writing is the action by which the artist invents a personal language which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. The course will begin with a brief introduction to the history of artists using ornamental language and surrealist automatic writing. The series of exercises will be set to explore the potential for automatic drawing techniques, asemic alphabets and conjunctions of images and descriptions that are open to interpretation.” (Text by courtesy of Emily Hunt)

Emily Hunt (b. 1981) lives and works in Berlin since 2017. Hunt has been running Big Ego Books since 2015. She was the co-Dictator of DUKE Magazine, an artist magazine focusing on Australian artists and thrift culture between 2005-2009. She has shown extensively in Australia since 2012, including at the Museum for Contemporary Art Sydney, First Draft, Casula Powerhouse, UTS Gallery, Artspace, Bundanon Trust, UQ Art Museum, KNULP and The Commercial gallery.Her work is held in collections that include The Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art (CCWA), Artbank, and Manly Art Gallery. She was awarded Marten Bequest Scholarship for Painting (2015), and Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant (2017), with two grants from Australia Council for the Arts (2014 & 2019). Her work has recently been shown at the Arp Museum Remagen, Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, Zitadelle Spandau (ZAK) and Sim Smith Gallery, London. In 2020 Hunt was selected as a participant in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnen Projekt. In 2021, Hunt’s first solo exhibition in Berlin opened at Galerie Wedding.

More information on the Emily Hunt Website.