abstraction
Highlights
Untitled (Pocket Drawings)
William Anastasi’s Pocket Drawings are made by marking folded sheets in his pocket while walking, creating abstract traces of movement. Part of his “unsighted” practice, they explore chance, motion, and perception, translating physical experience into subtle visual forms.
Painting with his feet
Kazuo Shiraga transformed painting into performance, using his feet to kick, drag, and smear thick oil paint across floor-laid canvases. His bold, dynamic gestures capture bodily energy, dissolving the line between artist, movement, and material.
Double Star: Antares
Double Star: Antares (1986–88) by Athena Tacha was a site-specific public sculpture in Cincinnati’s Hyde Park. Featuring 27 brick walls forming two star-like structures, it explored astronomy, spatial form, and landscape, but was later dismantled.
The Mourning After: Duration’s Wisdom II
Duration’s Wisdom II is a meditative walking performance on a 20-ft canvas, depicting the final stage of mourning. Using circular, continuous movements, Erika Knerr processed grief, revisiting loss and reflection, performed in Zaragoza, Spain after the Madrid attacks.
Pathscape
Pathscape is a project by Reg Carremans that explores movement, landscape, and painting. During the Sideways 2012 Walking and Art Festival, Carremans adapted his boots with canvases, capturing impressions of the terrain with each step to create "landscape paintings" in real-time.
Walking pieces
33 Days West
33 Days West is a series of photocopies from Foster Spragge’s original walking drawings. Each vertical strip represents a day’s walk, marking compass positions every 30 minutes, while the originals were mailed in nine envelopes from different stages of the walk.
Articles elsewhere
Mollie Rice, “Field Study, Parramatta Road” (2018)
“Mollie Rice explores human spatiality, and sensations of place, through an experimental drawing practice. Multiple visits to a particular site by the artist yield sound recordings, which are then translated into drawings in the studio, creating a complex connection between percpetion and place, action and experience. The works in this exhibition were created through a […]
Margaret Seymour, Walking in the Colour Field: Local and Remote (2018)
“WALKING IN THE COLOUR FIELD: LOCAL AND REMOTE (2018) ArticulateUpstairs, Articulate Project Space, Leichhardt, Sydney. WALKING IN THE COLOUR FIELD is an interactive artwork that takes place both inside and beyond the gallery. By wearing a specially designed sensor armband, two ‘remote’ participants who are simply going about their daily lives determine the colours displayed […]
Mike Dax, Salt Drawing (2022)
(credit) SALT from Michael Dax Iacovone on Vimeo. “Artist Statement: I like to think of drawing as a broad term, not limited to pencil on paper. Drawing is a record and a representation. It can be a record of what something looks like, or it can represent a location, or an action. It can be […]
