GREIG BURGOYNE
Drawing/ Performance/ Installation/ Sound/ Text
ARTIST STATEMENT
Burgoyne was born in Glasgow Scotland, studied at Universität Für Angewandte Vienna & MA painting Royal college of Art London.
He engages in a broad based site- specific drawing practice that embraces film, live performance, installation, sound, text, publishing and presentation at conference. Key to this is an ongoing interest in the visualising of the invisible, as such the paradox of drawing as a radical reappraisal of an intensification of bareness, and engagement with that situation of nothing as some-thing coming into appearance.
Each project takes place within, alongside process-led, rule based strategies. Theoretical frameworks specific to phenomenology, literary structures around the fragment, and absurdist dilemmas about space found in modern Russian fiction and sci-fi inform, that evolution. He immerses in concepts of play and the speculative, that are ultimately driven by curiosity and risk, often concluding with a de/materiality of the precarious, akin to the pathetic. As residual scraps of that forming/unforming, taking the anomalies of the space, he seeks to test, measure or expand the purposefulness without purpose in those body/site relations.
The results are immersive, often absurd and beguiling re-navigations or configurations specific to the site and /or subject.
Burgoyne proposes new dialogues that seek to generate a condition of becoming, translation and flux instead of stasis; a site of reciprocity and humility beyond solely location or spectacle.
NEWS
Solo exhibitions /Presentations in 2024 includes
MLAC Museo Laboratorio Arte Contemporanea Rome
Le Décathlon D'Apollon Chateau de Montsoreau- Museum of Contemporary Art France
(group exhibition)
Co-convenor Drawing conversations #5 - International conference on contemporary drawing UCA Farnham UK
Performance Art Bergen invited artist and symposium member-festival PAB Bergen Norway
Vestiges of memory International conference on autobiography and memory- Chair of panel & paper presentation- 'Hervé Guibert-what happens when you photograph what is not there?"
Museo Ex-chiesa di San Mattia Bologna (Commissioned by Ministry of Culture/City of Bologna )
Co-Writer for 'Drawing as Placemaking: Environment, History, and Identity' to be published by Bloomsbury Books
About the role of the paper- Transformations in the role of the contemporary drawing support:
Book chapter on his work, in the upcoming book, to be published by
Universidad de La Laguna -Tenerife
Recent Solo exhibitions /Presentations 2023/2 included
V
Jester/Gesture Hickster Projects Rome 2023
the one who was standing apart from me The Lowry Manchester 2023
Ciclop -Festival of performance art Mallorca Spain 2023
On not knowing-how artists teach: Conference paper presentation 'art is invisible'
Glasgow School of art, Scotland 2023
After Van Gogh-From a window/ Flowering Tree Palazzo Bentivoglio Bologna 2023
Teaching Beyond the Curriculum- Creativity as an Experimental Agenda-
Conference paper presentation 'expansive creativity is beyond the visual',
Louisiana State University, USA 2023
Pera Flora Fauna PORT- Venice Biennale 2022
Brief Encounters Whitstable Biennale Kent Performance 2022
Il Nuovo Mondo- Classic Workout Museo dell'Arte Classica Rome 2022
Inside Drawing PS2 Belfast 2023
The Clearing Presentation at III Conference of contemporary drawing UCM -
The practique of drawing as cognitive process -conference paper presentation -Universidad Complutense de Madrid 2022
Clearings NeulandProjektRaum Cologne 2022
Drawing the invisible in plain sight Drawing conversations#4 conference paper presentation-University of huddersfield/University of Coventry 2022
Casting the castle Civitella Ranieri Foundation Perugia Italy 2023
Featured Artist in Performance Drawing: New Practices since 1945 Published by Bloomsbury Books 2022
©2023GreigBurgoyne
NO IMAGES OR TEXTS MAY BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSION
Chateaû de Montsoreau Museé D'art Contemporain Loire Valley France
June 10th-August 11th 2024
Holding ghe world largest collection of work by Art & Language, the show featured works by artists from 77 countries. Confetti football is a five aside match in which Burgoyne seeks to isolate the gestures that inform its aims.The ball is a 2 euro coin size piece of confetti. The players air kicking endlessly to move the ball and score. Spotting the ball, at times even finding it can be challenging , whilst the necessary effort to play this game may be unsustainable. The field of gestures we are immersed in as a result suggests a dance floor not a football field.The 2023 work by Burgoyne 'Confetti Football'-where football is dancing, was selected for the show. The show was one of many in major museums across France, to coincide with the 2024 Paris Olympic games. Akin to an olympic games, each section of the show was judged by a panel of major critics and curators, Burgoyne's work 'confetti football' was awarded a trophy as winner, for the most innovative work in the video /film section.
Press release here
Links to view (films) performances available on request
From a window-after Van Gogh/ Flowering tree- after Van Gogh
Opened September 28th 2023
‘From a window-after Van Gogh’ is one of two site specific performance commissioned for Palazzo Bentivoglio Bologna. It is based upon the drawing ‘wheatfield seen from the window of Vincent’s room at the hospital of Saint Paul’ 1889. Part of an ongoing series of new works that seek to test the conceptual and performative frameworks within the drawings by the Dutch artist. In doing so, redefine drawing as an event of being inside the inside of that framework not outside it, looking in.Burgoyne seeks to activate the space depicted as a situation between the physical, visual, and mental. A motif of numerous late works by Van Gogh, the performance focuses on the wall depicted in the drawing. The world beyond it (the visual), the world within it (the physical and immediate) and the imagined reality sensed from the window- (the psychological/ mental) that wanders throughout that meeting of the physical and visual.
The material used are sheets of yellow fabric (‘dust sheets’- the material put on top of furniture when a person is decorating/painting a room) as such a means to protect and yet conceal that event. Yellow was Van Gogh’s favourite colour, but also an ongoing fascination for Burgoyne being as it is also a reference to light. Whilst light illuminates all things, yellow is unperceivable by the 'cones' that make up the human eye.
Burgoyne explores this tension of the inside, the outside, the seen and the sensed of this situation. He seeks to suggest in the drawing happening that paradox of seeing and unseeable, is to shift from being on the site, within the site - consumed by that situation and subsequently seeking to evade it. In doing so, Burgoyne attempts to suggest that the ‘drawing’ is that event of it happening, seeking to bring about its ‘imaging’. Not as a view or illustration, not as being in front of the wall, nor beyond it in ‘the world’ but inside the inside of the wall as an ideal, neither before or after limits but at its joints.Duration: approx. 20mins.
The performance 'Flowering tree' the second site specific performance commissioned for Palazzo Bentivoglio Bologna, took as its starting point a drawing by Van Gogh, it’s also a play on the name of the brand of photocopy paper that the artist uses in the performance called ‘ Evolution’. This is part of an ongoing series of new works that seek to test the conceptual and performative frameworks within the drawings by the Dutch artist. In doing so, as ways to redefine drawing as an event of coming into appearance.
Burgoyne immerses himself in the act of repetition and a critique of reproduction. The performance takes place on the mezzanine at Palazzo Bentivoglio Bologna, and the audience watches from below. The performance uses a pack of 500 sheets of white photocopy paper. ‘Flowering tree’ sees Burgoyne attempt to produce a linearity, again and again.
An act of reproduction it sees tragic machismo and absurd desperation collide. The performance attempts to amplify a rolling up of a line/sheet of paper that begins from inside the zip of his trousers. At the moment when Burgoyne is rolling the paper from one sheet into the other, he makes affirmative sounds. The vocal element shifts from the softly spoken when the task is easy to louder and desperate expressions of delirium as it seeks conclusion, as the task becomes more arduous and precarious. Like all things entropic, this phallic line will fall, it will break. Each time 'the drawing' falls downwards towards the audience below as it sheds its ambition, namely, to bring drawing into appearance. ‘Flowering tree’ is pathetic and primal, as Van Gogh tragedy and Robert Mapplethorpe absurdity collide.
The resulting reality is an awareness of the materiality of drawings surplus in seeking to do this, and the impossibility to reach that conclusion that sees closure fully appear. As such ‘flowering tree’ in coming into appearance, is its dissolution by default. Duration: approx. 17 minutes
Links to view (films) performances available on request
the one who was standing apart from me
11th March-16th April 2023
The one who was standing apart from me is an exhibition comprising specially commissioned film, performance, and installation works across the galleries of The Lowry by Scottish artist Greig Burgoyne. The work is complimented by several specifically chosen works on paper by LS Lowry. Rule based, process led, Burgoyne’s work immerses in the contradictory situation that is drawing, seeing drawing as he does as a sensorial field of visualising the invisible. The invisible here is not to mean something nonvisible, but an unconcealment of absence all around us. Installations, wall painting, and a series of screen-based site-specific performances are offered up to immerse the visitor in this dilemma.
The show is accompanied by live public and participatory performances, and an essay on drawing and invisibility by Burgoyne published by The Lowry.
Links to view (films) performances available on request
JESTER/ GESTURE
Hickster Projects Rome
Opened 6/4
Hickster Projects is delighted to announce a group exhibition Jester/Gesture featuring new work by six artists from Italy and the UK, at its project space in the heart of the San Lorenzo quarter of Rome.This show presents an eclectic group of works looking at the mercurial nature of how artists communicate outside the bounds of language.
Entitled Buzzing, this performance features hand painted paper that mimics the pearlescent surface of bluebottles, which he uses to cover the gallery floor. Burgoyne then runs around the space with a megaphone making a buzzing noise. When he runs out of air/breath/buzz, the sheet under his feet is crumpled up. He repeats this process, until all the sheets have been crumpled up. Appearing perhaps like dead flies, their appearance and situ is determined when the artist runs out of breath from buzzing continuously. Breath in that expansion of life and creative endeavour is that traversing of space which generates the work, albeit in the resulting gestures indicative of a contraction, bringing about the appearing of the flies, but also their demise.
Links to view (films) performances available on request
Jester -What is it? A fool? Probably not, can make you laugh but more importantly make you think, holding up a mirror, provoking you to see in a different way. A voice of dissent, a voice of truth, an enchanter. Seen mostly as unimportant, imbeciles even, these performers could influence kings, and change the course of history. At best, mesmerising their audience and spreading delight.
Gesture What is it? -An insult? More a cross cultural form of communication. A surfeit of feeling, overflowing from language into physical movement. Often connected to a modernist painterly movement in the 1950’s, it has always revolved around a performative visual manifestation. A reaction to external stimulus, often in an arresting and unexpected way,
The artists in this show approach their work in very different ways, have diverse concerns, but have in common a compelling need to communicate a conceived truth in a luminous and unpredictable way. Their practices resist the organising principle and embrace an unmechanized performative quality that owes everything to faith and risk. The privilege of the now seemingly extinct jester was the ability and right to speak truth to power, freely, without being punished. A voice of dissent is not a luxury – we live in extreme times - the Jester’s time is surely now.
Pera Flora Fauna
59th international Venice Biennale 2022
Collateral event
Pera + Flora + Fauna engages with the discourse around how indigenousness and nature are affected by mainstream cultural attitudes of industrialised nations, the very nations contributing to existing environmental problems. This leads us to question, can aesthetic thinking support the conservation and restoration of nature or indigenous rights and ways of life? Can indigenous populations across the globe challenge the mainstream documented (art) history written by the non-indigenous? Can indigenous populations achieve the liberty to collectively claim “their own history and narratives”, antagonising the dominant discourse? Pera + Flora + Fauna intends to address these questions drawing on different perspectives of man, nature, and their interrelation.
Pera + Flora + Fauna will take place at Archivi della Misericordia in Cannaregio, Venice. Commissioned by Nur Hanim Mohamed Khairuddin, General Manager of PORT, and curated by appointed lead curators Amir Zainorin and Khaled Ramadan, associate curators Annie Jael Kwan and Camilla Boemio and writer, academic & artist Greig Burgoyne. People of Remarkable Talents (PORT), an arts and culture agency under the Perak State Government, with support from the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, and the National Art Gallery Malaysia, announces its commission of the exhibition Pera + Flora + Fauna, as an official Collateral Event at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. PORT is honoured to present at this prestigious international art event, the artists and artworks that have been inspired by the rich histories and context of the state of Perak, Malaysia.
CIVITELLA RANIERI FOUNDATION PERUGIA ITALY
Opens 10th September
Read reviews in Artribune, Exibart , ATP journal
Civitella Ranieri Foundation is pleased to present the third edition of Casting the Castle, curated by Saverio Verini, to be held on September 10th, 2022. As the name suggests, Casting the Castle aims to reveal an unexpected image of Civitella Ranieri, unveiling its spaces in new and challenging ways.
After two years, Casting the Castle returns this year with a particularly rich program. The foundation commissioned nine artists for the occasion, who will present interventions of various natures – live performance, video, installations, and sound – scattered throughout the spaces of the Civitella Ranieri Castle.
Burgoyne presents 'Everest'- a new site specific performance work exploring the paradox of visibility and the invisible as pertains to drawing , here a building of appearance (something) is sought, while in its futility to succeed, the act of immersion in the materiality/making of nothing is the only result. in the case of ' Everest' the rolling and unrolling of tape has created pile of fake rocks that if unrolled, as a continuous line, the tape would be equal to the height of Everest. The outcome -It is easier to climb the actual Everest, than draw as activation or realisation, far less ascend this modest peak.
The subtitle, They Repeat Themselves Constantly, but Do Not Create a Sense of Habit, is from a text written in 2011 by a past Civitella Ranieri Fellow, the visual artist Riccardo Benassi, dedicated to the sounds he heard from his studio window during his residency: A polyphony tied to the different proposals for Casting the Castle, which at the same time references the concept of repetition, another theme of this year’s event. All the works and interventions are in fact united by the reiteration of gestures, images, and voices,suggesting in some cases the idea of an actual loop, an incessant and circular energy that is unleashed in the spaces of Civitella Ranieri, something between entropy and expansion. A “performative” exhibition, where movement is always present, both live and in the works installed in the various rooms of the Castle. In this sense, the exhibition aims to underline the temporal and ephemeral dimension of this third edition of Casting the Castle. Image credit: ©MarcoGiugliarelli for Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2022
Links to view (films) performances available on request
3RD UCM CONFERENCE ON CONTEMPORARY DRAWING
Universidad du Complutense Madrid
Burgoyne presented the paper 'Drawing as an invisible present' at the conference and an extended paper by him on this subject will be published with an electronic ISSN.
His and other contributors texts will be made public on the website of the GI "Drawing and Knowledge" and on the website of the Observatory of Graphic Practices in February 2023.
The Clearing
NEULAND PROJEKT RAUM COLOGNE
Opens 30th September -exhibition runs until 23rd October
A two person show with Rome based painter Michele Tocca. The show will be exploring through a series of paintings by Tocca, an installation and screen based performances by Burgoyne the liminality between what constitutes apperaring and what that materiality may signifiy , taking as its starting point the concept of the clearing as formulated by Heidegger. This is to say, that the genesis of the act of making and bringing into appearance is not where we see but what is sensed. As such it is beyond appearance and the exteriorly of aesthetics but instead a facticity of being. The works in this show seek to extend upon this process of disclosure by the act of concealment, as a result what is hidden is in fact an opening up of what is truly there, less as a thing of being, but instead an event of phenomenon. For this show, Burgoyne will present three works comprising an installation, and 2 performance works in the form of 1screen based work and 1 large scale projection.
DRAWING CONVERSATIONS:ENGAGING WITH SITES OF HISTORY AND NARRATIVE
University of Huddersfield
2nd September 9.30 start ONLINE
All info here
Burgoyne will present a series of propositions around drawing being never of what is in appearance but is an act immersed in albeit without bringing to conclusion any appearance, instead drawing is an oscillation between thing and event hidden in plain sight. this will be through a discussion of Pier dig a work commissioned in 2018 for the Arts Festival ArtWalk Porty.
This one-day symposium examines the interrelationships of drawing and engaging with sites of history and narrative. At the heart of this will be drawing as an embodied act, drawing in the expanded field, variable in definition, and as both individual and collective processes. Exploring expanded drawing methodology through connecting and curating of sites’ narrative and histories might involve capturing textures, vistas, traces, movement of history and narrative. How does drawing engage with histories and narratives of sites? What does processes of methods of drawing reveal from a particular site or place? What is the relationship of the final work to a site’s history or narrative? How is history and narrative defined?
The event has 3 keynote presentations by Anita Taylor, practicing artist, Dean, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at University of Dundee, founder and director of Jerwood Drawing (now Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize) and founder director of Drawing Projects UK, Deanna Petherbridge (CBE), a practicing artist, curator and writer of The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice, published June 2010, Layla Curtis, a practicing artist and founder of Edgework, an artist-led, online store and multidisciplinary journal with a focus on place and 16 papers from practitioners, art historians and theoreticians.
Inside drawing-The Living Contradiction
PS2 Belfast
Opens 25th June with live performance 6pm
Meaning is invisible, but the visible is not the contradiction of the visible. The visible itself has an inner framework- membrane, and the invisible is the secret counterpart of the visible. It appears only within it.. one cannot see it there and every effort to see it makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible. The visible is pregnant with the invisible.
The visible and the invisible / Merleau-Ponty
The living contradiction is a five-day residency culminating in a series of works that respond to the site that is PS2. Through installation, film and live performance Burgoyne’s practice is a rule based, process led but expansive drawing practice wrestling body, site relations and their subsequent paradoxes. Often verging on the absurd, the outcomes he sees as residual scraps of that forming and unforming that is the interplay between appearance and presentness. During his time in PS2 he seeks to continue his focus on phenomenological concerns around invisibility and visibility e.g. what is present when we draw, and where is this actuality located.
The title of this new project, and his first in Belfast, derives from a term discussed by Emmanuel Levinas, living contradiction is namely the past orientated nature of our daily existence alongside a future directed intentionality, as such our lives oscillate between two fluid and divergent paths. In terms of drawing, Burgoyne seeks to both expand and paradoxically disperse the traditional trope of drawing as a means to cover. Contesting that drawing is a manifestation of surfaces or exteriorities, Burgoyne offers up situations that by the act of covering are in fact seeking to unconceal the thingness of drawing that resides within that materiality- itsdrawingness. In doings so, Inside drawing-The living contradiction offers a series of propositions in the form of installation, film and live performance less based on what has appeared or appearance per se, but instead indicative of drawing as an incessant coming into appearance. Between thing and event, object and subject, embodiment and worlding.
Links to view (films) performances available on request
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
Whitstable Biennale 2022
11th June 11-5pm in/ around Whitstable Kent
This is a participatory performance in and around the streets and harbour area of Whitstable. As a performative game, its potential failure to succeed will result in generating speculative and adhoc meetings of people with the participants, through spontaneous social meetings and interactions.
4 people who have never met and don’t know what each other looks like seek each other out, during the first Saturday of the biennale. The selection of each participant will be arranged by a third party working for the organiser -Greig Burgoyne. Each of the four participants will be wearing a different colour t-shirt i.e. 1 in black, 1 in blue, 1 in red and 1 in green. The aim is that each of them seek to find the others. They have from 11am-5pm to do this and each of participants must walk around Whitstable and remain outdoors throughout, except for loo breaks/ or a coordinated lunch break for all participants.
If they meet/find another of the participants then together seek to find the others. If they don’t find any of the other participants which is possible, if not highly likely, they will of course meet and speak with others wearing colour t-shirts who are NOT the people they were seeking.
Links to view (films) performances available on request
CLASSIC WORKOUT
Museo Dell'Arte Classica Roma in Co-operation with Sapienza/ University of Rome
Curated by Camilla Boemio
Opens 4th February -26th February 2022
Info here
A review in Exibart Art magazine and a film of the live performance will be available soon. Catalogue available on request.
‘Whatever I do, I cannot control what is going to happen’ 1
As part of Il Nuovo Mondo curated by Camilla Boemio, UK based artist Greig Burgoyne was invited to explore that connectivity or not, between Places, people and actions, and in doing so perhaps expand how and where we are present.
In the hegemonic system of capitalism, imposed synchronicities reign. This is where high-performance culture and we are told, the fall out that is human impotence collides with a faceless technological futurity that we cannot revolt against exists. Whatever we do short of becoming automatons, being human is an obstacle to that digital future, neither fast enough, efficient enough not reliable enough.
Based on the collection of statues within the Museum of Classical Art, Burgoyne and an invited group of performers observe, enact gestures and articulations from the figures that reside in the numerous corridors of this vast collection. The result is less to extend what these statues look like, but instead animate and contest that space between object and viewer as a dynamic field of potential, surprise and even absurdity.
Walter Benjamin writing on Berthold Brecht tells us gestures are found in reality.. the now, but to duplicate those gestures of the past is little more than imitation.
Paradoxically, through repetition and accumulation, Classic workout imitates the statues body language, where maximum effort meets minimal output. Gestures leads to a divergence, through our inability to follow to those very actions in the first place.
This is a keep-fit routine of sorts, performed within the central auditorium of the museum. Classic workout is where participants mimic one statue or pose after another albeit all while inside the confines of handcrafted hessian sacks, as such between forming and visuality, sensed but perhaps not seen. These statues with their imposed constructs of duty, strength, power and heroism are activated, in doing so, paradoxically revealing vulnerability, fragility- Immersing us instead in a non-hierarchical if precarious state of emancipation. Classic workout is to live beyond what is seen and as a collaborative work, go to places one might not have gone on one’s own. Classic workout is between invention and transformation, undercurrents of a simultaneous forming and unforming indicative of actions we are yet to have know. In The trouble with being born Cioran states ‘We are a mixture of automaton and whim, a robot with defects, a robot out of order’ 3. Long may we remain so.
1 Benasayag, Miguel. (2019) The tyranny of algorithms Europa editions Paris
Links to view (films) performances available on request
NEGOTIATIONS
Greig Burgoyne and Elisabeth Sonneck
Paper Gallery Manchester
Open 5th November -18th December 2021
More info Here
Read an interview in the gallery magazine Fourdrinier on the work here
Negotiations is a two-person collaborative exhibition at PAPER, featuring Berlin-based artist Elisabeth Sonneck and Glasgow-based artist, Greig Burgoyne. The starting point of the work is the concept of drawings as a substrate; it is neither front, back or inside, but is in fact, all its sides. Through rule based, process led making and thinking, each artist engages with the residual scraps of making, specifically how those rhythms may be located and extended. Burgoyne and Sonneck ask the viewers to immerse themselves in what Henri Maldiney describes as being ‘like waves, the two movements, ascending, descending are each of them in procession of themselves into their opposite’.
Negotiations incorporates both galleries at PAPER. Sonneck presents a large-scale site-specific installation incorporating paper and paint that will consume PAPER. In contrast, Burgoyne will present a new work, The Clearing in PAPER2. It consists of a series of works creating during a live performance that will take place in the courtyard area outside of PAPER, with residual objects resulting from the performance presented in the gallery itself. In The Clearing, Burgoyne literally wrestles with Heidegger’s concept of the clearing as an act of unconcealment of that which is concealed. In this case, drawing as revealing of its surface. The result, is a forming of the paper by its surfacing with insulating tape, that conceals the original thing. In doing so to reveal the things essence that appears hidden, would destroy the thing hidden. Hence its presence in its concealing revealed. This will then be presented alongside a film of the performance and installation for the duration of the show. In the gallery space, Burgoyne sought to reverse the hard, rigid and static nature of the space with a wall drawing installation that like the clearing conceptually reverses the base matter be it from flat and expansive to implosive and wrestling in its forming, from heavy to light in its gesturing and the actual materials chosen. This is akin to acknowledging the wall through touching it and the walls resist, in its meeting as marking by the tape.
Referring back to Maldiney, Burgoyne and Sonneck could be viewed as those two opposites; navigating toward the place they paradoxically began form. As a result, their explorations of PAPER are to be determined by the space itself. The work remains in a state of flux until installation and subsequent performance. Though the practices of both artists are in striking contrast, Negotiations is where an intense logic verging on the machine-like and the absurd world of paradox meet.
RAID
Galleria Bruno Lisi Rome
Opens June 6th-21st June
Curated by Camilla Boemio
\More info Here
Exploring dialogues with space and form, Burgoyne was invited to present the work 'Paper cell/Bad Drawing 2017. A live performance was also intended of other works but unfortunately this was not possible.
FEATURED ARTIST
Performance Drawing - New practices since 1945
Edited by Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea & Carali McCal
Published by Bloomsbury books, September 2020
Read more HERE
What is 'performance drawing'? When does a drawing turn into a performance? Is the act of drawing in itself a performative process, whether a viewer is present or not? Through conversation, interviews and essays, the authors illuminate these questions, and what it might mean to perform, and what it might mean to draw, in a diverse and expressive contemporary practice since 1945.
The term 'performance drawing' first appeared in the subtitle of Catherine de Zegher'sDrawing Papers 20: Performance Drawings, in particular with reference to Alison Knowles and Elena del Rivero. In this book, it is used as a trope, and a thread of thinking, to describe a process dedicated to broadening the field of drawing through resourceful practices and cross-disciplinary influence.
Featuring a wide range of international artists, this book presents pioneering practitioners, alongside current and emerging artists. The combination of experiences and disciplines in the expanded field has established a vibrant art movement that has been progressively burgeoning in the last few years. The Introduction contextualises the background and identifies contemporary approaches to performance drawing. As a way to embrace the different voices and various lenses in producing this book, the authors combine individual perspectives and critical methodology in the five chapters.
While embedded in ephemerality and immediacy, the themes encompass body and energy, time and motion, light and space, imagined and observed, demonstrating how drawing can act as a performative tool. The dynamic interaction leads to a collective understanding of the term, performance drawing, and addresses the key developments and future directions of this applied drawing process.
DELAY #1
SPAZIO MENSA ROME
Opens February 27th February 2021
\More info Here
Exploring Animal communications and behaviour Burgoyne was invited to present the work 'Lost in space' 2019. A live performance was also intended of other works but unfortunately this was not possible.
Links to view (films) performances available on request
PAPIER SKULPTURAL
Verein Für Aktuelle Kunst Rührgebiet (VAKR) Oberhausen
Opens August 31st / continues until 4th October 2020
Read more HERE
Colin Ardley | Gabriele Basch | Tashi Brauen | Greig Burgoyne | Emil Cimiotti | Goekhan Erdogan | Tom Früchtl | Dorthe Goeden | Monika Grzymala | Eri Kato | Phillip Langer | Ulrike Mohr | Ivo Ringe | Sophia Schama | Fiene Scharp | Martin Bruno Schmid | Carsten Sievers | Elisabeth Sonneck | Magnus von Stetten | Jutta Steudle | Esther Stocker | Ignacio Uriarte
Papier kann als Träger von Zeichnung und Malerei fungieren, in dieser Ausstellung erscheint es aber vor allem in seinen vielfältigen materiellen Eigenheiten und Möglichkeiten der physischen Bearbeitung. Mit gebräuchlichen Druckerpapieren im DIN-Format, großen Papierbögen, gerollten Papierbahnen, transparenten Papieren, alltäglichen Papierresten, Well- und anderen Pappen, stabilen Kartonagen, selbst hergestellten Papieren, ... ist bereits das scheinbar vertraute Ausgangsmaterial sehr verschieden. Umso vielfältiger sind die damit verbundenen künstlerischen Handlungen, die die gewohnte Flächigkeit von Papier in körperliche Präsenz transformieren. Sie können von behutsamen Berührungen bis zum Verletzen und Zerstören des Papiers, von momentan-beiläufig erscheinenden Eingriffen bis zu repetitiven Bearbeitungen reichen, raumbezogenen Konzepten folgen oder auch das gegebene Material in seinem chemischen Zustand verändern. Durch Bezeichnung, Bedruckung oder Bemalung der Oberflächen können zudem widersprüchliche Fährten gelegt werden, die für Irritationen sorgen. Schon insofern der Gebrauch von Papier in allen Bereichen der Kultur, von industrieller bis zu alltäglich-privater Nutzung, verankert ist, kann der künstlerische Umgang mit Papier Seh- und Denkgewohnheiten unterwandern - in Arbeiten, die von der beständigen Fragilität des Materials und von komplexer Einfachheit seiner Behandlung getragen werden.
Paper frequently serves as a material support for drawing and painting. However, in this exhibition it is presented, above all, in its diverse range of material properties and possibilities of physical transformation. With the use of DIN format print papers, large sheets of paper, rolls of paper, transparent paper, everyday scraps of paper, handmade papers, robust cardboard packing, corrugated and other paper boards, this familiar material exists already in extreme variety. All the more varied are the related actions which transform the conventional flatness of paper into physical presences. This can extend from cautious contact, through to the damaging and destruction of paper, from apparently incidental spontaneous interventions, to repetitive acts. Some in turn follow a spatially related concept or alter the given material in its chemical constituents. By meanings of drawing, printing or painting on the surfaces contradictory trails can be laid down which provoke perceptual irritation. In so much as the use of paper is anchored in all areas of culture, from industrial to everyday use, the artists approach to paper infiltrates and subverts habits of seeing and thinking - in works which are bound by the constant fragility of the material and through complex simplicity of treatment.
FEATURED ARTIST
Drawing beyond itself
AIR GALLERY, Manchester
Opens October 2020
Read more HERE
Drawing has always been used as a tool to slow down and observe the world around us: its material form leaving a record of this experience. But what is the nature of drawing today?
This exhibition intends to challenge pre-conceptions of what drawing is and reflect the diverse range and expanded nature of contemporary drawing in the UK.
For this show Burgoyne presenters a new work BALL DRAWING
The work explores numerous ideas around the moving drawing and one that contest the tdational picture plane, in this case a game if trying to mark a moving ball, should the ball escape the area in its to be marked , the ' game ' ends.
Everything has to begin somewhere and even the simplest mark becomes a starting point: the foundation of a drawing. But how can drawing go beyond this? Is drawing more than a group of marks on a page? Can the act of drawing be just as important as the final outcome? And how can drawing extend itself physically and conceptually across 'other' mediums like painting, sculpture, performance and wider social contexts.
Showcasing an eclectic mix of contemporary approaches to drawing, the exhibition will challenge the mediums boundaries, providing a testing ground for artists to re-imagine drawing as they see fit. By opening a space where a plurality of narratives around drawing co-exist we aim to spark conversation and encourage a questioning of drawings possibilities. On or off paper, 2d or 3d we are presenting practices rooted in drawing which approach the medium in a creative way: works which questions drawings role today as it emerges somewhere between thought and the physical act of making.
PAErsche Invites.. Greig Burgoyne
Kunsthallen Bochum Germany
Live performance and installations
OPENED 20/2/20
Links to view (film of) performance available on request
At the invitation of the Kunsthallen Bochum and PAErsche the Cologne based International performance art network, Burgoyne responded with two works Spaceman a performance and Spacetime a series of performative sculptural gestures.
In both, the aims are to simultaneously measure and make space. In the former, Burgoyne becomes the space around him, in Space time the space measured he seeks to erect in the site.
As the accumulation of uncharted territory evolves, Burgoyne's gestures and dimensions take on the characteristics akin to some kind of absurd sumo wrestler/ come astronaut moon walk. In Spacetime the attempt to get a material to reach the limits of the site, results in the remnants of that immersion in the entropic verging on the pathetic.
Photography Dominik Antoni
NEGOTIATIONS
Online digital work combining interactive phonics and moving image
Commissioned by Arts council England for Tempo Arts
Each of the 4 parts of the work will be launched every Friday throughout July
INTERACT WITH THE WORK/S HERE
During Covid-19 our windows have given us both distance from and proximity to our surroundings, an uneasy combination of separation and exposure, allowing us to stay in touch with neighbours and welcome changes in season. Normally thresholds for us to open up to the world they now limit our choices, providing controllable, if fragile, barriers from risk and danger. Whilst recent times have brought isolation, separation and loss, we’ve also discovered fresh opportunities to explore what home means and new digital ways of inviting people into our spaces for celebration and enjoyment. Tempo Arts is delighted to be working with five international artists to present ‘Your Place’, a new digital on-line project which offers alternative perspectives during the lockdown and beyond. ‘Your Place’ will remain live on the site through April 2021.
Negotiations is a film you can interact with in times of restricted movement. Restrictions on our movements have given us the opportunity to look on spaces in new ways, letting us investigate places we would normally not look at, at all. Locations chosen by the artist are either normally too busy to be able to measure and scrutinise or areas in the midst of the public realm which we normally regard as having little or no significance whatsoever.
As an interactive work combining measurements of peripheries filmed, and phonics where each linguistic element was generated through a rule based system devised by Burgoyne. The viewer simply clicks randomly on the moving image. Depending on where you click, a different phonic related to space and language will be activated. As a result the viewer makes the space. Each part of the project that is released each wk, will offer up a different means to interact and subsequently produce the moving image/sound dialogues.
This is a Tempo Arts Commission as part of 'Your Place' and is realised by public funding through Arts Council England's Covid-199 Emergency response fund and East Sussex Arts Partnership
BETWEEN THE SUNNY AND THE OPAQUE
DRAWING PROJECTS UK supported by Anita Taylor
Collaborative Residency and Exhibition
OPEN 23/10-9/11
Links to view (films) performances available on request
The work in this exhibition was produced during a residency at Drawing Projects UK. This collaborative drawing project acknowledges drawing as a state of becoming. This notion of drawing as a developmental practice that recognizes its experiential nature, its processes and its duration, where sensory experience is more than sight, but also embraces gesture, action, and the ethereal.
The collaborative project utilized dialogues between drawing, action, and performance, using various communication methods, including text, sound, voice and mark making. Motivated by an interest in rules and conventions, both the production of new work and the subsequent exhibition considers how space can be articulated through process-led practices that utilize inventory,written and oral systems to delineate and produce content. The project space we worked
in during the residency at DPUK was also the subject of the works by its scale dimensions, contents and light.
The project’s objective was to explore how drawing could evoke the unseen and reconsider how we see, what we perceive and how physical, volumetric representations of body/site can be understood. This objective enabled two specific questions that centered our work and investigations. These asked how drawing functions both with and within space to establish a instance where nothing turns into something and secondly, by hollowing out what may be overlooked within the project space. To hollow out is to magnify what is discovered as we generate distinctions between formless space and its divisions.
A collection of strategies was devised to address this, and from this body of work we derived Chatroom, Headlanders 1, 2, 3, 4 & Space Wrestling 1, Chatroom 2, & Space Wrestling 2 video works. For Chatroom we collected an inventory of words that described the elements and objects of the project space. We created rules that required us to speak these words phonetically using the inventory in no particular order to create a dialogue. This was recorded and typed into a word document; producing the text works in the gallery space. For the video Chatroom piece we collected words that described characteristics of the room, these included murmur, open, slippage, sharp, fizzy, drop, ruptures, dappled & disperse. Here we attempted to speak the words; however, we prohibited the sounds leaving our mouths by holding our mouths closed with our fingers. This was filmed in the space, documenting the iterations of the words as the light left the space, leaving the sounds in ambiguity and darkness. Space wrestling set rules that created opportunity to play two games in the space. Each game used a single piece of confetti, which was moved by creating gestures that directed air and moved the confetti into the opponent’s goal / basket. Within this, spatial gestures indicative of excess energy for minimal effect come into play, both as means to explore drawn space and contest it limits both of action, aim and value.
Headlanders are a series of performative gestures within a predetermined space, that subsequently leads to a space beyond this. To say liberated gestures, means to contest the sedimentary actions we perform daily and instead to allow automatic and instinctual ones to emerge. In each case, Burgoyne and O’Donnell activated a position, in turn albeit absurdly are subsequently seen from that viewpoint. Four Headlands of sorts are arrived at, north to east to south to west. Subsequently displayed as they are within the framed panelling of the foyer gallery, the Headlanders both orientate and re-configure the space and its meetings of artwork and public. In common with all the works from this project, Headlanders is to literally enter the materiality of drawing, not simple rest on its surface e.g, paper, and like drawing this is both to take a position and be seen from a position in time and space.
RESTLESS LININGS
KOSAR CONTEMPORARY BRISTOL
Greig Burgoyne, Robert Luzar, Lucy O'Donnell & Joe Graham
OPEN 1/11-25/11
SEE THE FILMS HERE
Restless Linings was the opportunity to explore ongoing interests in language, space and its navigation or not. In what had previously been a vast industrial site, Burgoyne made three works Positions, Ball drawing and Walkabout . Through rule based 'games' be they with word, through measurement or endurance. In each case, Burgoyne and members of the public are invited to explore the taking up of positions , that throughout the duration of the show by their ephemeral nature will disperse and instead perhaps be position-less. From stating a position to being led to one, but then losing it in the process.
PART OF '74 YEARS-RESPONSES TO THE ANTHROPOCENE'
CURATED BY OTHER ART NETWORK
COMMISSIONED FOR GOODNESTONE PARK AND GARDENS KENT
OPEN 18TH JUNE UNTIL 30TH AUGUST 2019 WITH LIVE PERFORMANCE 16TH AUGUST
Links to view (films) performances available on request
(Actual performance 1hr 49 mins, film is edited version)
Lost in space sees Burgoyne in an inflatable horse costume. The starting point is a 'horse' measures its stable area (the gallery where the resulting performance as film will be shown) by counting out-loud its footsteps while simultaneously recording this on an iPhone. Then outside, in the vast grounds opposite the stately home, the horse plays back the recording and follows the 74 steps (measurement of footsteps to walk area of stable) 74 times. In theory the horse will reiterate its stable area, instead it seems to wander aimlessness but with conviction. decisively indecisive , purposeful lack of purpose, futility, perhaps lost in space.
As part of The Other-Space this presents ‘74 Years’ this is an exhibition bringing together works from 11 contemporary artists working in a variety of media, embracing film, sculpture, installation, poetry and performance.
Positioned abruptly in what the OA.N describes as a moment of cognitive short-termism, 74 Years continues the OA.N’s interest in the passage of time. The title is a reference to the Trinity Test on the 16th of July 1945, a moment that the Geological Society later coined as; the start of the era in which mankind has had a significant impact on the geology of the earth, or, the Anthropocene.
The steady normalisation of states of disaster across the world is a powerful demonstration of the human capacity to avert the mind from impending catastrophe. 74 Years aims to confront this cognitive short-termism and engage with our present epoch by presenting carefully curated art works in a setting where you are invited to consider the events of the last 74 years and their impact on the systems of the Earth.
CURATED BY SUE KENNINGTON
A TWO PERSON SHOW WITH MICHELE TOCCA
OPENS AUGUST 10TH -31ST AUGUST 2019
Links to view (films) performances available on request
Burgoyne presents two site specific works specially conceived for the site and space. Beachballs (Drawing) a live performance in which Burgoyne seeks to draw on a moving non- flat surface. In this case, the surface is Thirty nine 61cm diameter beachballs, 39 being the number that would be required to cover the floor area of the gallery space where he will exhibit the resulting film. Alongside this, a large soft spatial form, the result of measuring by walking on floor cloths ( he bought locally) across the surface area of his accommodation given him during his stay.'Beachballs' combines a Sisyphean endurance and dadesque absurdity as he wrestles with the beachballs, seeking as he is to connect them in sellotape. A line seeking to contain a mass of non flat space..covering, constricting the balls , they're energy, whose aim is to do everything but.
OPENS 27TH JUNE- 29TH SEPTEMBER
Links to view (films) performances available on request
A major show of contemporary artists exploring the role of chance processes in art. The show based around the ideas of John Cage features Yoko Ono, Kieth Tyson, Greig Burgoyne and Sara Sze. From film, installation, photography, performance and painting, Burgoyne presented two works for this show, 'sticky walk' and 'post-it note dance'. For the opening night he made a live performance 'Sticky walk'.
'Sticky walk', is Burgoyne led by walking on an amount of duct tape equal to the length of each gallery space. Where it will end the process decides, like the post-it note dance the performance concludes when Burgoyne has jumped, shaken off all the post-it notes form his body, albeit the rule being, he can't use his hands to assist him in that process. For the duration of the show, its trace and residual elements remain like post it notes on the floor next to the 'Post-it note dance' on the floor where they fell. 'Sticky walk' was presented as a large scale projection, while in the case of 'Post-it note dance' as a small scale enclosed flat screen presentation..
EDINBURGH ARTS FESTIVAL in collaboration with Deirdre McLeod
LIVE 8 HOUR INTERVENTION AUGUST 5TH 2019 WITHIN A SQUARE MILE AREA OF CENTRAL EDINBURGH
As a means to navigate the tourist gaze; a mass of people at festival time in Edinburgh who move in a mass, unclear where they are going, or what they will see as they contract, disperse and meet again drifting from one spectacle to the next. Into this mix 4 people, starting from different points in the city, with a very clear purpose to weave in and through that mass.
Burgoyne and 3 colleagues from the dept. of geography at the University of Edinburgh each select one colour ,and follow anyone wearing at least one item of clothing of that colour until the person they are following moves beyond the square mile designated as the boundary of the project. Burgoyne wearing a blue t-shirt seeks to follow people in blue, should he pass someone going in the opposite direction while following another person wearing blue he can chose to change route and follow them instead. Each member of the project documents those encounters throughout the day. The route Burgoyne's was led along, ,like his colleagues, was mapped throughout the the day using tracking technology. Coincidentally, people he lost while following were re-encountered and then re-followed, albeit elsewhere in Edinburgh later that day, paradoxically while he was following another blue wearer. The project will be the subject of an exhibition which collates our findings in 2020 in Edinburgh.
IDENTITY
Part of SynodDort400
VARIOUS LOCATIONS DORDRECHT NETHERLANDS
19TH NOVEMBER / WITH LIVE PERFORMANCES THRU NOVEMBER, DAILY IN AND AROUND DODRECHT CITY CENTRE SHOW CONTINUES UNTIL DECEMBER 2ND 2018
Links to view (films) performances available on request
One of 12 artists from across Europe selected to respond to the urban spaces and sites within the Netherlands oldest city, Dordrecht.
Burgoyne responded with daily interventions through installation and performance that began by measuring the walkable space of his hotel room. The was then walked and recorded on floor cloths, in turn these became individual (stuffed with local free newspapers) soft forms based for each set of foot steps taken. The outcome 'My space your space, your space, our space' became a relational work that was less a series of 8 'accumulations of space' but more a means to meet and see Burgoyne's space become a shifting site generating interconnections and journeys with the public at random through the city streets. Less an artwork, but a catalyst for dialogue and exchange. Not a static experience that engagement with art can often be, but instead a catalyst for spontaneous dynamic connectivity to flourish.
The further works in the city included performances with locally bought materials such as polystyrene balls as in 'Spot the ball' where, much effort to throw a polystyrene ball repeatedly into the air, documenting it results in no ball being seen.
'Making a point' sees Burgoyne in the city square pointing to a pillar and seeking to follow a film of him walking towards said pillar. He fails and wanders everywhere but to the pillar, missing it on every attempt.
'Walk about' explores the role instructions, that are subsequently used to navigate and then attempt reiterate a public space. Burgoyne walks a designated part of one of the cities squares. In this case a city square dedicated to one of Dordrech's most famous artist. Here Burgoyne records his voice counting each step of the designated area, then he plays it back on his iPhone and follows it. Absurdly, he appears deep in thought and focus (which he is) but absurdly lost and confused at the same time to the numerous bemused passers by he encounters.
Supported by The National Lottery through ACE project Grants. Curated by Yvo Van Der Vat.
P/ROPS
PART OF GENT MATINEES
P/ROPS PERFORMANCE/RESEARCH SPACE GENT BELGIUM
19,20,21ST OCTOBER 2018
Exhibition of work by featured artists who have collaborated with the organisation. Included installation and presentation of works by Burgoyne made in 2017 in collaboration with Sabine Oosterlynck
OPENS 30TH AUGUST/ WITH LIVE PERFORMANCES 30TH AUGUST, 1& 2ND SEPTEMBER / SHOW CONTINUES UNTIL 9TH SEPTEMBER 2018
"We are always between here and there"
Michael de certeau
Pier to Pier is one of three commissioned works for ArtwalkPorty, for Portobello beach, Edinburgh
September 2018
The project received reviews at The skinny; Phil miller Arts Correspondent Glasgow Herald and was featured on The afternoon show hosted by Grant Stott, BBC Radio Scotland with Doug Johnstone
Links to view (films) performances available on request
Alongs side Pier dig, and an interactive walking/ drawing game in the festival newspaper, Pier to pier is a participatory performance, a meeting of one space that is lost and another which is very much in existence. In this case it is the melding of the circumference of Portobello pier (in the form of 129 Metres of elastic chord) which once stood on this site, and the walking of the length / breadths dimensions from one end to the other of the prize winning pier at Hastings on the Sussex coast.
The films document Burgoyne's footsteps walking form one side to the Hastings pier to the other. Of the 15 unique films that result, the participants are each given one recording to follow as a video on their mobile phones. In turn, they lead the rest of the group; the spaces both lost and present expand and contract, as a mobile architectural dance of sorts ensues.
After each participant has led the other members of the space, they leave the elastic space, until there is only two left, then one.
Paradoxically, only by keeping a distance from each other can the shifting, drawn space exist.
In the case of the final two participants, keeping the chord off the sand and maintaining that lost/present space may appear more like a tug of war than a situation of cooperation and togetherness, a manifestation perhaps of being between here and never there.
FUNDED BY CITY OF EDINBURGH COUNCIL
OPENS 30TH AUGUST/ WITH LIVE PERFORMANCES 30TH AUGUST, 1& 2ND SEPTEMBER
VIEW THE FILM OF THE PERFORMANCE PIER DIG HERE
SHOW CONTINUES UNTIL 9TH SEPTEMBER 2018
Pier Dig is one of three commissioned works for ArtWalkPorty, for Portobello beach, Edinburgh
September 2018
The project received reviews at The skinny; Phil miller Arts Correspondent Glasgow Herald and was featured on The afternoon show hosted by Grant Stott, BBC Radio Scotland with Doug Johnstone
Links to view (films) performances available on request
A 7hr drawing performance (edited excerpt)
Commissioned by ArtWalkPorty for Portobello Beach, Edinburgh
September 2018
Pier Dig set out to move an area of sand relative to the pier that once stood on the site at Portobello. Starting at low tide, battling with an incoming tide in due course, the area of sand is dug, moved and until the sand/ space moved is lost amongst the sand/ space it is already in the midst of. In an absurd act of endurance by reiterating its position in time and space, the pier is dispersed and paradoxically lost in space.
FUNDED BY CITY OF EDINBURGH COUNCIL
CELUI QUI NE M'ACCOMPAGNAIT PAS
MÉDIATÈQUE DU MOULLE FRANCE
OPENS 27TH SEPTEMBER , WITH LIVE SOUND PERFORMANCE AND WALK, EXHIBITION CONTINUES UNTIL 10TH NOVEMBER 2018
Médiatèque du Moulle Hauts de France France
Curated by Christine Gist,and supported by The national Lottery through ACE Project Grants
THE PROJECT WAS REVIEWED BY L'INDEPENDANT FRANCE (NEWSPAPER) 4/10/18
The sound work that was the culmination of this performance and installation is available on request
The capitalist notion of ‘flat time’, is a schematic, routine and ordered time/space we are so familiar with, so much so we don’t even notice it.
This project asks If it is possible to evade this container for our perception, and experience a simultaneous time and space by the very act of paradoxically intensifying its logic.
More specifically, when we read are we aware of the words or is the story the key function of the book? When we think of words we immediately are controlled again by language, its logic and its imposed and learned meanings that come with it.
French theorist De Certeau in his book ‘The practice of everyday life’ spoke of walking as a metaphor of writing, where we write a text but are unable to read it as we don’t stop and turn around…
In addition, Wittgenstein said that the limits of our language are the limits of our world… are limits always about expanding in quantity when the quality of that experience of language make be more enriching and memorable.
The resulting project is three works, each directly and indirectly combining walking without preplanning where we are going, alongside an experience of sound derived from editing books.
Each work arrived at through a process led rule based system where play and speculation have been key factors. Books have systems of ordering space and time, pages and content, as does language, through spending an intensive and focused period of time within the library, Burgoyne has applied an alternate system that collection that both opens up that order and liberates the words as a result.
The first of three works that make this project is a wall text work in vinyl, that is the result of combining the first line of the in the first book and last line, on the last page of the last book from each subject area in the entire library collection. When placed in a grid matrix an ordered disorder that is less words but more sounds-phonics. As opposed to visualising as we often do when reading, Burgoyne seeks to draw our attention to the pure sounds before they become words and stories. In this way the wall work is a a drawing of sound as letters.
Combined with the respective page numbers these lines occurred on, when transcribed to footsteps to walk, become the live performance to be given on the opening night of the show, where Burgoyne utters the sounds of the books, while walking both in and outside the library space as the footsteps walked orientate that journey that results. You are invited to follow him as he walks. In this he seeks to release words from order and containment and liberate them in space and time.
The conclusion of this event is a sound work to listen to while walking in and around the library oneself. The recording combines the spoken sounds of the wall text, and a recorded walk taking in the circumference of the town itself, textures, sound and space meet a parallel space of sounds uttered and dispersed, as a mobile sense of space as breath. The recording can be listened to, on the various headsets placed in and around the library site.
The project is complimented by a series of incidental works, that explore the notion of the site being outside ones immediate sense of time and space.
These actions result in modest works made of A4paper and brown tape such as 'bookworm' indicative of the measurement of unrolling tape and re rolling in relation to walking the library space. These extend to the residual elements such as the bank card used to rub the vinyl onto the wall, that appear book-like at its demise.
Finally, situated in the large cabinet as one enters the Médiatèque, is a series of digital prints representing the empty spaces between books. Images of empty shelves on paradoxically empty shelves. Filling an empty spaces with images Burgoyne sees as materially physical- yet potentially devoid or liberated of content.
THE ONE WHO WAS STANDING APART FROM ME
MART GALLERY DUBLIN
COMMISSIONED BY LIVESTOCK PERFORMANCE ART PLATFORM , CURATED BY FRANCIS FAY
OPENS 21ST SEPTEMBER 2018
‘The one who was standing apart from me’
A series of drawing performances by Kiera O’Toole & Greig Burgoyne
“Drawing draws its mark in the act of withdrawing… Forming a place …to go from nothing to something”
Jean Luc-Nancy
Links to view (films) performances available on request
Jean Luc-Nancy notes in his text titled The pleasure in drawing, that drawing has an 'ability to effect and be effected (by the) force from the outside or more precisely the force of sharing and opening, between an inside and outside which refer to one another”. Wrestling with this context, contemporary artists Greig Burgoyne and Kiera O'Toole propose dynamic drawing performances that engage the notion of the phenomenological of site, as a reorienting dialogue with bodily space and drawings sense of endless becoming. The result is to present a drawing performance by O’Toole and Burgoyne that begins as performing space while resulting in a residual sense of place. Albeit, akin to a game where territory is stated, evaded, expanded and contracted, with little sense of victory possible.
Through two striking and contrasting practices, Burgoyne and O'Toole share a rich immersion and teasing of how we constitute place, bringing the absurd alongside the experience of time, as they evolve a further third space akin to host and ghost; Both Burgoyne and O'Toole’s practice and research contribute a series of dialogic responses that embrace drawing in its widest sense, from the performative to the trace element. From the traditional to the ubiquitous, the role of materials play a key factor in that dialogue. For Burgoyne, this is to source it from the locality in an act of contingency, where an absurd logic will flourish as materials, repetition, and endurance meet with site and bring about a newly configured sense of space. For O’Toole, the changing and temporal of site is a starting point to embrace the aesthetic potential and the experience that results.
ORGAN ICON- UNE AVENTURE DE COPRS
QSP GALERIE ROUBAIX FRANCE & LA PETIT GALERIE DU MONDE ROUBAIX FRANCE
OPENS MARCH 10TH/ WITH LIVE PERFORMANCES MARCH 11TH / SHOW CONTINUES UNTIL 12TH MAY 2018
OK-NO 1 is one of two contrasting responses to window spaces for two coinciding projects. This one OK-NO 2 at QSP Galerie / B.A R (bureau d'art et recherche) Roubaix as part of the show Organ Icon – Une Aventure de Corps. It also features two live performances at La Petit Galerie du Monde also in Roubaix on 11th March. The other presentation in the series OK-NO is a Solo presentation at La Confection Idéal Tourcoing.
The 2 live performances Island & Walk/Count/Follow/Lost 3 presented live on
on March 11th, can now be viewed online at the Youtube channel.
This new work by Burgoyne extends key aspects of his work. The role of play meets the process led and rule based as an interrogation of drawings conceptual framework alongside the body’s dialogue with site.
OK-NO 2 is both affirmation and negation of a position. It begins aloft, from a unrolled pile of of blue floor cloths, reiterating that positon it is undermined, by the very activity of seeking to maintain it.
This position, that Burgoyne begins with, is less ‘The window on Europe’ that is grandly evoked by Peter the Great. Instead, it is a more sombre, perhaps bland vision. Positions of viewer and viewed become uncertain, while the portal, in the form of the actual window that meets these positions, may be more tangible.
In OK-NO 2 Burgoyne walkouts rolls of kitchen towel, led by the sporadic motion of the rolls, they dictate the direction the direction he takes in the gallery space. The rolls are depleted and in turn the cardboard tube becomes a navigating device to locate the stray lines of kitchen roll, as he seeks to unity the paper in one place and stand aloft upon. He moves back and forth treading precariously, at other moments erasing, perhaps seeming even to be cleaning the floor. As these activities advance, Burgoyne shifts, slips, drifts askew. Dispersal of both the material that supports him and the body in haphazard orientations ensue.
In parallel to this, projected outward from the main windows of QSP Galerie, we see Burgoyne stands aloft a roll of floor cloths, he seeks to emphasise his position by 'stamping ' on them. In doing so, paradoxically he disperses his position and is marooned as result. Unity is replaced by isolation or is he surrounded by the very material he sought to find unity with? In emphasising his position, he pushes it away as a consequence. Perhaps indicative of a space that is unstable and a subsequent place that is unsustainable, a metaphorical window, Burgoyne’s antics brings its own reality in contrast to the virtual one the wordplay OK-NO 2 may deny (Okno is the Russian word for window)
Between a here and there, the filter that is the window, in its materiality maybe stable albeit fragile, while on either side of this portal, all may be far from it, and Burgoyne shows us in various forms, outcomes indicative of a being marooned as a result .
OK-NO
LA CONFECTION IDÉALE TOURCOING FRANCE
9th MARCH -APRIL 28th 2018
To compliment this show, there will be a talk & live performance by Burgoyne at Lille III Université March 7th
This new work OK-NO by Burgoyne extends key aspects of his work. The role of play meets the process led and rule based as an interrogation of drawings conceptual framework alongside the body’s dialogue with site.
Links to view (films) performances available on request
OK-NO is both affirmation and negation of a position. It begins with Burgoyne aloft 2 stacks of multicoloured floor cloths, seeking to maintain a position on top of all the floor cloths and keeping them together for 3 hours ( 3hrs is the time the resulting projection is shown each night) Simultaneously, using a IPhone camera, Burgoyne tries to focus on the word ‘chemist’ (pharmacie) on the shop front across the street from the gallery. The stacks of cloths slip, slide and disperse, back and forth, as does Burgoyne while attempting to maintain the unity of this fluctuating arena of cloths and the view ahead.
This position, that Burgoyne begins with, is less ‘The window on Europe’ that was grandly evoked by Peter the Great. Instead, it is a more mundane one. Positions of viewer and viewed become uncertain and in disarray, while the portal, in the form of the actual window that sits between these positions, seems more tangible.
In OK-NO Burgoyne falls back and forth as he tries to keep all the cloths underfoot together. As these activities advance, the view we see in the resulting projection like Burgoyne is one that seems increasingly unstable & perhaps unsustainable.
The window Burgoyne’s antics is projected toward brings its own reality in contrast to the virtual one, the wordplay of OK-NO may deny (Okno is the Russian word for window)
Between a here and there, the filter that is the window, in its materiality maybe stable albeit fragile, while on either side of this portal, all may be far from it. A visit to the chemist for some remedy, may be necessary.
RESTLESS LININGS
WIMBLEDON SPACE LONDON
A COLLABORATIVE DRAWING PROJECT OF INSTALLATION & PERFORMANCE BETWEEN GREIG BURGOYNE, JOE GRAHAM, ROBERT LUZAR AND LUCY O'DONNEL; PART OF ACTS / RE-ACTS 5
EXHIBITION 19TH FEBRUARY -3RD MARCH 2018
PERFORMANCE LAB 1ST & 2ND MARCH MORE INFO HERE
The film can be viewed on the Youtube channel
This project resulted in a series of performances exploring a broad range of conceptual frameworks within and around drawing. Burgoyne presents a live performance in two parts Walk & Count and Follow/Lost, in which he and his colleagues each measure a quadrant of the gallery space through walking and counting their steps, simultaneously they record their feet movements and voices counting this steps.
When they each measured their section of space, beginning together they then follow the film of their counting /measuring. From a logical and systematic attempt to reiterate measured space, the outcome is less logical, where Burgoyne and his assisting colleagues wander instead aimlessly in space led astray paradoxically by the very rules & spaces they sought to reaffirm.
^
STITCH UP
A SITE SPECIFIC PROJECT P/ROPS GHENT FOR NEST GHENT BELGIUM
Live performances, contingent installations and public participatory events.
Links to view (films) performances available on request
December 2017
A series of Live performances, contingent installations and public participatory events by Artist Greig Burgoyne with Sabine Oosterlynck commissioned by P/rops for NEST Ghent Belgium
To co-incide with Gent Matinees art wk/ends this was an immersive speculative 4 day residency based in NEST- the former library for the City of Ghent Belgium. NEST is an experimental and unfolding situation, whereby while the libary is re-located, for one year this 5 storey block is a temporary haven or 'nest' for start -up companies, the homeless, stateless, artists projects, a make shift houseplant hospital not to mention cafes and bars.
The project comprised a series of responses using materials acquired on or near the site to respond to an 70's looking ex- librarians office and its immediate surroundings both inside and out. The first outcome entitled 'Stripes' -A series of repetition gestures using brown parcel tape, reiterates the linear brown wood panelling within the space. A drawing performance that both covers yet reiterates in some kind of workout of gestural strokes of a daily grind of architectural space.
Prior to this a series of live performative works entitled 'Islands' using locally sourced floorcloths evolved in and around the surrounding interior spaces/ corridors. This also echoed a development of walk/count/follow/lost, here it is Burgoyne & Oosterlynck who measure out, by walking their alternate space, recorded on mobiles then 'swap' and follow those actions, only to desert the spaces they are in the process of reiterating.
This was concluded with two alternate performances of 'Yellow Brick Roads'1 & 2, that begin through repetitive gestures indicative of floor cleaning within the office space using bright yellow floorcloths bought/sourced nearby. These part speculative / rule based performances resulted in a 'yellow brick road' of sorts that was then directed as a walk across the roads and through the streets of Ghent. The walks continued until the cloths disintegrated or parted company with each other and Burgoyne was left stranded, so to speak.
In his text 'Desert islands and other texts' Deleuze spoke of the deserted as less indicative of the island, but instead the sea around it. In these times of strife, forced diaspora and rapid migration though conflict, NEST seems a poignant site for this series of actions somewhere deserted by logic but compelled by it, re-orientating new spaces or configurations that embrace periphery and inclusivity, albeit seemingly in the midst of the very opposite.
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ISLAND WORKOUT
A DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE TESTING RELATIONS BETWEEN BODY & SPACE 15MIN 42SEC (ORIGINAL PERFORMANCE 2HRS 13MINS)
COMMISSIONED FOR COASTAL CURRENTS -THE ANNUAL ARTS FESTIVAL, HASTINGS SUSSEX SEPTEMBER 2017
Links to view (films) performances available on request
READ THE CATALOGUE HERE
September 2017
Island workout
15min 42sec (original performance 2hrs15mins)
A durational Performance testing relations between body and space
Burgoyne unites process led, rule based repetition, endurance, accumulation and duration. Taking anomalies of the space, he seeks to test or expand alternative relations between body and site with regard to space and thinking. Be they absurd or beguiling, Burgoyne proposes new dialogues and frameworks that seek to generate a condition of becoming, translation and flux instead of stasis; a site of experience rather than merely location.
Commissioned for the Contemporary Arts Festival Coastal Currents, Burgoyne will evolve a durational work within the raised space above the Warrior Square toilets. This is an in-between space; buffeted by the sea to which it looks out toward and passed by a constant flux of traffic that moves to and fro behind it.
Burgoyne will be seeking to immerse us its island like status. To do this will be to extend the site specificity of this elevated setting as one between a drifting raft of the medusa and an elevated space albeit propped up by its paradoxical toilet status and all that this may evoke.
The performance and subsequent film to be shown in the window of the British Heart Foundation window located along the seafront, sees Burgoyne along with his colleagues move back and forth following the changing, sporadic rhythms of the traffic and tides whilst emphasising the limits of the space. In doing bringing the tempo of traffic and tide to the inside of the toilet area. The outcome sees a static toilet roof become a turbulent site seemingly swaying and rocking, as the absurd keep fit workout of sorts ensues.
Shown in the BHF window, the film will be indicative perhaps of the benefits of keep fit, whilst evocative, in its sporadic tempo and movement by the performers of the towns heartbeat.
Between a naïve sense of hope and misguided logic, this live performance and subsequent film embraces endurance &repetition in an absurd evocation of the pros and cons limits of space may signify when tested. In doing so, is to propose Island Work-out may be symptomatic of more than it seems. In its virtual form, the performance by Burgoyne will shift from one suggestive of expansion and contraction akin to a breathing presence, to a closed entity evocative of remoteness and the alienated.
You can read a Review of Coastal Currents and the performance by Greig Burgoyne Island Workout
Read the festival Brochure giving you an idea of the programme if you missed it.
Watch the BBC TV coverage of Coastal Currents
ACE funded
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WALK/COUNT/FOLLOW/LOST -A STUDY IN PATCH DYNAMICS
PART OF 'EMBODIED CARTOGRAPHIES' CURATED BY FAY STEVENS FOR FRINGE ARTS BATH MAY 2017
Links to view (films) performances available on request
Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things, caught in the fabric of the world
Merleau-Ponty
'Walk/Count/ follow/Lost' -a study in patch dynamics is a live (walking) performance that embraces the experience and implications of limits that walking both confronts and seeks liberation from. Walk/Count/Follow/Lost seeks to elevate the concept of patch dynamics, which is the idea of pockets of heterogeneity existing in the midst of homogeneity.Walk/count/follow/lost extends in scale and scope spaces limits, colliding with both an incidental and targeted audience. Counting ones footsteps aloud while walking a given space in four orientations. Recorded simultaneously and then played back and followed. In doing so the space measured through walking becomes instructions to reiterate that space. The logic of the walking act and space instead see that logic unravel as new orientations and re-navigations evolve that will both displace logic and reconfigure that meeting of site, its audience and performer.
The absurd sense of being led astray (by oneself), ‘off grid ‘ looks to debate the organised gesture that is walking, where those leading becoming led perhaps in search of what De Certeau called the elsewhere. This is the place beyond the homogenous, ordered, and commoditised albeit paradoxically taking the form of someone appearing to be led by his or her mobile phone. The resulting performance will be to bring about a ripple-like shift beyond the generic; an emergent patch dynamic from within the norm.
Embodied Cartographies is an evocative proposition, an exploration of work where walking is used to investigate how the human body engages with, documents, inscribes, marks, perceives, and understands terrains both urban and rural. Artists in this exhibition including Kenji Lim, Greig Burgoyne and Robert Luzar explore the theme of embodiment and cartography in a variety of lateral and exciting ways with the range of creative and conceptual artistic practices including film, drawing, sculpture, sound, photography and performance. As such the exhibition and symposium at Bath Spa University engages in a thoughtful way, with the concept of cartography as embodied and offers a philosophical and inspiring engagement with the practice of mark-making as language, performance, choreography and wayfinding.
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BREATHING SPACE CENTRE CULTUREL BALAVOINE ARQUES FRANCE IN COLLABORATION WITH LA VERITA DANCE COMPANY, BRUSSELS
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Links to view (films) performances available on request
SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2016
A collaboration with La Verita Dance Company Brussels, this project was part of BreathingSpace -A site specific commission for La Barcarolle Centre Culturel Balavoine in Arques (62) France from September to December 2016. The project explored Deleuze's idea of 'islands'. A late work of Deleuze, he spoke of islands that are formed by splitting and fragmenting from a greater site, and those islands formed form within , growing from within, akin to surfacing.
The wall drawings in measuring and relocating space , sought to extend ideas of autonomous space and its heterogenous dynamics within the generic and regulated public spaces. whilst the drawings in their measuring and calculating of walked space /uniting body and site , the very logic and rules of obtaining this information and utilising it to realise the drawings , led to anomalies. Instead of emphasising that united public space , it intensified a fragmenting and removal from it. The performance sought to physically manifest that parallel space with its anomalies and speculate its experience. In doings so take location beyond one of stasis, toward of flux and transition.
The wall drawings with there optically shifting sen of imploded space meet the expansive gestures of the body , seen together a space akin to breathing may be the outcome, where we are simultaneously moving in and out of space -one we travel that splits and ripples with in front of our eyes and another that meets us as it grows.
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QUADRATURIN LA CONFECTION IDÉALE TOURCOING FRANCE.
INSTALL VIEWS ABOVE
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DECEMBER 2016-JANUARY 2017
La Confection Idéale –Espace D’art Contemporain Tourcoing
En collaboration avec ESBA Tourcoing et Dunkerque
As part of the on-going series exploring contemporary Drawing ‘It’s not only paper’ at La Confection Idéale, Scottish artist Greig Burgoyne presents Quadraturin
This new project of film, installation, contingent making and performance takes its title Quadraturin from the collected short stories of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. In this story it begins in the tiny apartment (room?) of a man. By chance he is visited by a salesmen selling a potion by the name of Quadraturin which when brushed onto walls or ceilings will make the space bigger- albeit from the outside it appears unchanged. In his eagerness to see his tiny space expand he liberally spreads the potion over all the surfaces in his lodgings. Over the next few days his dream of more space becomes an existential nightmare, as the room shows no sign of halting its rapid increase in scale. The tale culminates in the man being lost in space.
The context of this project starts with the C’ommission for Re-measuring space’- set up in 1930’s Soviet Russia. Advocating 9 sqaure metres to each person, the commission routinely checked and re-verified that each individual (if you could call them individuals) had no more than the regulated amount of space. Quadraturin takes this logic of the absurd as the starting point for a series of process led rule-based explorations of site and space at La confection idéale.
As is his practice Burgoyne uses the materials of the office in acts of drawing that either measure or cover. Quadraturin is a dialogue of navigations and re-orientations between body, site and spaces limits. Here a logic is intensified at times akin to dancing, at others closer to the staggered steps of Sisyphus where any utopian notions of liberation may seem a distant memory.
The outcomes of this mini-residence in the form of film, installation, contingent making & walking, seek to activate the site beyond one of location and stasis toward one of transition, experience and flux, potentially to move beyond a space while in the very act of reiterating its limits.
Quadraturin is more Beckett than Lefebvre in its desire to expand upon
Bernard Schumi’s question ’ Does space have limits? if it does what is beyond those limits or if space has no limits, does space simply go on and on? Both Immersive and absurd, our forays into space may be best avoided.
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DRAW TO PERFORM 3 - INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF DRAWING & PERFORMANCE.
CURATED BY RAM SAMOCHA. CROW'S NEST GALLERY LONDON
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Links to view (films) performances available on request
JULY 2016
Burgoyne offers up Counting/walking/-a study in limitless limits.
Beginning in one corner or centre of the space, each person has a pool of either ketchup, mayonnaise, brown sauce or Mustard to walk through and into in the process of measuring the space by walking. These materials chosen for their ubiquitous appeal and aroma, add to the absurd logic that is a key facet of his performative drawings and drawing practice as a whole.
Each assistant along with Burgoyne, walks a pre determined route around the space . In doing so they count they're steps out loud. The elastic around their legs as restraint is a tool to maintain standardised steps by all the performers. For Burgoyne the very idea of reiterating the limits of the space though word and movement, is paradoxically the very means to suggest an alternative limit less space , in the durations count aloud.
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CONCEPT CZONG INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART (CICA MUSEUM)
SOUTH KOREA
INSTALL VIEWS ABOVE CLICK ON MAIN IMAGE TO VIEW FULL SCREEN & SCROLL
MAY 2016
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THE PRISON DRAWING PROJECT SCARBOROUGH JAIL YORKSHIRE
SELECTED ARTIST FOR THIS PROJECT COMMISSIONED FOR COASTIVAL FEBRUARY 2017
INSTALL VIEWS ABOVE CLICK ON MAIN IMAGE TO VIEW FULL SCREEN & SCROLL
FEBRUARY 2017
The prison Drawing Project Scarborough Jail Yorkshire UK February 2017
Greig Burgoyne
‘Only when we move do we see the chains’ Rosa Luxemburg
Bad drawing / paper cell was commissioned by Coastival/ ACE as a site specific drawing performance presented as a film grafted onto the space that is the cell. It takes the notion of drawing as an act of covering and form of measurement, in an immersive act of attempted liberation. Measuring using rolls of paper, the film chronicles what could be seen as a bad day wallpapering a space, no assistants, paste or ladders just a desire to cover and negate the cell. Only stopping when exhausted, Burgoyne offers the viewer a spectacle of endurance undaunted by a failure doomed from the start. In his attempts to be free of the cell, he is potentially submerged in the paper as a result. The outcome is a film projected across the cell walls that unites the tension between the restricted, solid space with a fluidity and potential of the performative act. Consequently, the solid and static of the prison cell could be in doubt and liberation maybe indeed be possible.
Bad drawing/paper cell, was selected & commissioned for the The Prison Drawing Project as part of Coastival, the annual Arts festival for Scarborough Yorkshire February 2017
ACE funded
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SCAPELANDS DRAWING BOX TOURNAI BELGIUM
GALLERY 1- DRYBOARD MARKERS ON WALL/ GALLERY 2- NICEDAY HIGHLIGHTERS & POST IT NOTES ON WALL-DIMENSIONS VARIABLE
INSTALL VIEWS ABOVE
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OCTOBER /NOVEMBER 2015
‘Evidence of reality had never been as pressing as in this slip toward disappearance’ (1)
‘At certain times it seemed to me this transparency was the only solid ground that remained to me, and, if I went forward, it was by resting on my own image thus reflected, while this reflection was perpetuated to infinity, indifferent to the ruins of time. A reflection that had no doubt attracted me by its fragility. The assurance that in resting on it, I would inevitably fall fast, but the fall was infinite, at each moment of the fall the reflection formed again under my steps indestructible’ (1)
Scapelands is a reflection of sorts, where anomalies of spaces within the site have been studied, debated and in turn amplified, expanded upon and even imploded. Process-led and rule based Burgoyne is extending his exploration of repetition, duration and accumulation through drawing in the broadest sense.
Scapelands is a term given by J.F Lyotard to suggest estrangement from a place, as though one is alien to it, the known of landscape becomes unknown.
From Photocopy paper, dry-board markers to highlighters, the ubiquitous media of the office slides from a functional logic and clarity to another whilst paradoxically still bearing order and logic albeit of another kind. In doing so, magnify formal credentials of weight, colour and line.
Scapelands pushes body and site relations proposing we re-negotiate generic space and enter a new and transformative dialogue with space that may both alienate yet offer greater potential than otherwise exists.
Scapelands offers three propositions to navigate. Awkward concentrations of paper, both comical and absurd through process and rules have established themselves at odds with the seemingly clear geometry of the gallery site, having collapsed perhaps the very symmetries of the space. In doing so, pull together an infinite potential of space from a finite and bound sense of place. These rolled spaces are complemented by wall drawings at key points within this long narrow space. The wall works as Schematic and playful games seek to debate the space we think we know with a reactivated space we might be now encountering.
These like all Burgoyne’s works he sees as propositions only completed or brought into being as a context they are in, through what Deleuze calls their multiple entry and exit points of interpretation and representation. As drawings be they volumetric or spacial they aim to advance the notion of becoming where drawing and meaning is in constant transformation or as Jean Luc Nancy calls‘ a truth... showing the infinity of becoming visible; The movement through which appearance is possible cannot be finished thus it is about showing what does not show itself’(2)
Absurd and ridiculous as it maybe, Scapelands is engaged in the serious play of drawing as it grapples with process and idea, thinking, body and space.
Through markmaking, endurance and a tactile rapport with space Scapelands is a contingent and speculative re-appraisal of limits and all that is fixed.
Through gallery 2 the starting point was the irregularities of 2 doors- 1 whole, full, the other divided by a wall, part blocked – a space disunited from its forming.
Burgoyne sought to bring this form/ space anomaly together not represent it. Through rules of measurement and process he was keen to offer up an afterimage through an accumulation of experience of the markmaking, generate in one’s mind the space lost. Highlighters draw our attention to things, the text we read,and an aide memoire no less. In calculating the number of pairs of post-it notes required to make up the lost space Burgoyne offers a fugitive experience of the tension between the temporal and stable-that which exists but cannot be seen. The result both mentally and physically sees walls and floor shift in competing flux as one moves in and around the space.
Indeed only in closing our eyes might we momentarily see the space lost.
Scapelands is drawing as a reality of disappearance where neither inside nor outside may prevail.
(1) Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas / The one who was standing apart from me
Blanchot. Maurice 1993 Stationhill Literary editions. Translated by Lydia Davis
(2) Le plaisir au dessin/ The Pleasure in Drawing
Nancy. Jean Luc 2013 Fordham University Press New York translated by Philip Armstrong
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WHITENOISE
A RESIDENCY & EXHIBITION BY GREIG BURGOYNE with ROSSELLA EMANUELE AT THE CENTRE FOR RECENT DRAWING LONDON
INSTALL VIEWS ABOVE CLICK ON MAIN IMAGE TO VIEW FULL SCREEN SCROLL
MAY-JUNE 2015
Centre for Recent Drawing London May - June 2015
Reception Thursday 4th June 6-9
Exhibition 4-12th June 2015
There will be a publication with commissioned essays and interviews following the exhibition.
“The premise of the residency is that neither Burgoyne nor Emanuelle would not be present at the same time in the gallery space. This working strategy brings the benefit of an inbuilt dialogue and testing of drawing and performance processes. The gallery space becomes a speculative site for contingent making and activities, where each artist negotiates its intervention by responding to what the other has left or not in the space.
In the form of markmaking, walking, combined with repetition, accumulation and endurance, the resulting drawing, installation, film and/or sound works aim to debate how drawing can explore systems of space and thinking. By this we mean the forces of energy and 'becoming' brought into the space in the making of the work and those energies and forces that exist already in and outside of the context and site together.
The notion of the rhizome is a useful means to test out drawing as perfomative practice as it allows us to open up a non-hierarchical way of thinking and responding where there are multiple entry and exit points of interpretation and representation, be it language, gesture, architectural elements and rule based markmaking; its ordering may be random, instinctual or considered. The resulting work Burgoyne sees as propositions only completed or brought into being as a result of the context it is in. The culminating exhibition aims to reconceptualise the body/site relation through performative actions that take the gallery space beyond a condition of stasis to one of translation and flux, a site of experience rather than location; extending the Bergsonian sense of the ‘not yet’ to a becoming of multiplictiy, endurance and duration.” GB
This exhibition is made possible by Arts Council England, the University for the Creative Arts and the Dovehouse Trust. C4RD is a Registered UK Charity 1123530.
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GAPFILLERS BRIGGAIT PROJECT SPACE AT WASPS STUDIOS GLASGOW
INSTALL VIEWS ABOVE
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WATCH A FILM/INTERVIEW OF THE WORK IN PROGRESS ON ART IN SCOTLAND TV
READ THE EXHIBITION REVIEW BY ART CRITIC PHIL MILLER IN THE GLASGOW HERALD
MARCH - APRIL 2015
Briggait spaces 1 + 2 Wasps studios Bridgegate Glasgow
Performance/ installation 9th march – 13th March 2015
Opening event 13th March 6-9pm
Exhibition runs until 17th April 2015
Dryboard markers & post it notes on wall/ dimensions variable/
We all live such distant and anonymous lives, disguised we suffer the fate of strangers. To some this distance is never revealed; for yet others it is revealed only now and then... for yet others it is one painful constant in their daily lives.
Knowing clearly who we are has nothing to do with us, that what we think or feel is always in translation... an exile from our own feelings
- Fernando Pessoa
What is revealed and what is distant and if that space can be bridged are key aspects of this 5 day 40hr drawing performance that takes the idiosyncrasies of the front of house project spaces at Briggait as its starting point. Gapfillers aims to rethink space and create a new dialogue between performance and audience in the endless and open that is space as an event. Migrating across walls with post-it notes and dryboard markers, Gapfillers is process led, rule based immersion in the fixed and relational that is space and time.
From fish market to vast renovated project spaces, this exhibition unites repetition, accumulation and endurance alongside specific references to the site; notably its junctures, levels and asymmetry. Burgoyne is keen to bridge the anomalies between the spaces organisation and the inter-relational dynamics of moving in and around those same spaces.
As an outcome the series of wall drawings led by their rules and processes in seeking to fill those anomalies within the site may in fact be renouncing itself in the very act of extolling its presence. In doing so Gapfillers may be less a ‘fullness of space ‘and instead a ‘fullness of emptiness’ and perhaps an exile from itself.
Common to all Burgoyne’s wall drawings, films and installations, he exploits the materials of the office. From Highlighters, flipchart pens, biros to post-it notes.
Burgoyne is testing their standardised credentials of colour, regularities of line, absorbency and opacity. Burgoyne sees his resulting work as finite propositions, only completed or brought into being as a result of the context they are in. In doing so, inviting the audience to play a part in the completion of the work whilst challenge, and at other times liberate, our rapport with space beyond something contained and subsequently closed to further development.
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FAX KARST PLYMOUTH MAY/JUNE 2014 CLOSING EVENT 15TH JUNE
ORGANISED BY THE DRAWING CENTRE NEW YORK
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MAY - JUNE 2104
Fax Karst Plymouth May/June 2014 closing event 15th June
Invited artist for this international touring show organised by The Drawing Centre New York
Fax explores ideas of reproduction, distribution, communication and technological obsolescence. The resulting work is permanently added to its accumulative archive. Featured artists included Richard Wentworth, Martha Rosler, David Blandy and Clunie Reid.
Fax on paper dimensions 21cm x 8.89mtrs based on sequential drawings each on A4 paper using flipchart pens and using 1 pair of post-it notes.
OMON RA THE DRAWING PROJECT IADT GALLERY DUBLIN
INSTALL VIEWS ABOVE
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OCTOBER 2013
Wall drawing 10mtrs length approx. flipchart pens and dryboard markers on wall
Suspended works on paper -each 5.2mtrs long x 1.5mtrs dryboard markers and post notes
Invited artist as part of the ongoing drawing project where contemporary artists respond to the site.
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DÉCOUVRIR/DISCOVER
CENTRE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN ESPACE 36, ST. OMER, FRANCE
INSTALL VIEWS ABOVE
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NOVEMBER- DEC 2012 MARCH 2013
Works on paper dimensions variable/ dryboard markers on paper 2.7mtrs long approx.
A Residency in cooperation with Musee de D’hôtel Sandelin situated in the Pays-de-Calais region, which explored the links between how we move through private and public spaces. Burgoyne made interactive floor plans that sought to record the links between how people move in public and private spaces. The result was a series of large scale drawings that could be seen as portraits of peoples’ thinking.
CV
Education
Born Glasgow Scotland
MA Royal College of Art London UK
Hoschüle für Angewandte Kunst Vienna Austria
Solo exhibitions /presentations in 2024 includes
MLAC Museo Laboratorio Arte Contemporanea Rome
Alchemilla+ è uno spazio multifunzionale dedicato alle arti performative, Palazzo Vizzani Bologna
Performance Art Bergen festival PAB Bergen Norway
Co-convenor Drawing conversations #5 -international conference on contemrporary drawing UCA Farnham UK
Baroque ex- church of St. Mattia Bologna (Commission)
Co-Writer for 'Drawing as Placemaking: Environment, History, and Identity' to be published by Bloomsbury Books
Five Years London
Recent Solo Projects
2023 Jester/Gesture Hickster Projects Rome
2023 the one who was standing apart from me The Lowry Manchester
2023 Ciclop- Festival of performance art Mallorca Spain
2023 On not knowing/How artists teach- Conference paper presentation on art as invisibility at Glasgow School of art, Scotland
2023 From a window/ Flowering tree -after Van Gogh Palazzo Bentivoglio Bologna
2023 Beyond the visual -conference presentation -Louisiana State University USA
2022 Brief Encounters Whitstable Biennale Kent Performance
2022 Il Nuovo Mondo- Classic Workout Museo dell'Arte Classica Rome
2022 nside Drawing PS2 Belfast residency, exhibition and live performance
2022 The Clearing Presentation at III Conference of contemporary drawing UCM -The practique of drawing as cognitive process -conference paper presentation -Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
2022 Clearings NeulandProjektRaum Cologne Germany
2022 Drawing-the invisible in plain sight Drawing conversations#4 conference paper presentation-University of huddersfield/University of Coventry
2022 Casting the castle Civitella Ranieri Foundation Perugia Italy
2021 Delay#1 Spazio Mensa Rome
Group show with Sandra Hauser (D), Giuseppe De Mattia (IT), Francesco Alberico,(IT) Francesco Zanatta (IT)
2021 Raid Galleria Bruno Lisi Rome
2021 The Volatile Gaze ]GAZE[ Art-space Shrewsbury UK
2021 Negotiations Paper Gallery Manchester 2 person show with Elisabeth Sonneck
2020 2nd Night of experimental boredom Lodge222 Dordrecht
2020 PAErsche Collective meets Greig Burgoyne...Kunsthallen Bochum Germany
2020 Negotiations Online interactive digital Commission Arts Council England for Tempo Arts
2020 Drawing beyond itself Air Gallery Manchester group show
2020 Featured Artist in Performance Drawing: New Practices since 1945
Published by Bloomsbury Books (September)
2020 There's nothing happening in there/gallery open series of impromptu performances around Zuzuzhii Art Lab Hastings (as part of Coastal Current Arts Festival
2020 ouch me! online show / various artists (September 19th launch online and live London)
2020 Papier Skulptural Verein Für Aktuelle Kunst Rührgebiet Oberhausen (VAKR) Group show with Monika Gryzmala and Ignacio Uriarte
2019 Expect the unexpected The Lowry Manchester (group show with John Baldessari, Yoko ono, Sara Sze, Gillian Wearing & Keith Tyson)
2019 Brief encounters (with Deirdre McLeod) Edinburgh Arts Festival
2019 First Night of experimental Boredom Lodge 222 Dordrecht Holland Curated by Frans Van Lent
2019 74years OA.Network commission Goodnestone Park Kent
2019 Reality Hickster Projects Perugia Italy
2019 Between the sunny and the opaque Drawing Projects UK
2019 Restless Linings Kosar Contemporary Bristol
2018 Identity invited artist as part of the International festival SynodeDort400 Dordrecht Holland curated by Yvo Van Der Vat (installations , participatory live street performances, screened film works and non participatory live performances.
2018 Celui qui ne m'accompagner Pas Commissioned by Médiathèque du Moulle, Hauts de France, Curated by Christine Gist in cooperation with Espace 36 Association D'art Contemporain (wall text work, interactive sound work , live performance, incidental 3d works and series of vitrine presented digital prints )
2018 Someone Standing apart from me Commissioned by Livestock Performance platform MART Gallery Dublin (live performance with residual installation element)
2018 Pier To Pier / Pier Dig Commissioned by ArtWalkPorty, Portobello Beach, Edinburgh (live durational (6.5 hrs) performance on Portobello beach)
2018 Curator- Coastal Currents Arts Festival Hastings
2018 Resident artist H E A R - Haut École Des Arts Du Rhin, Mulhouse/ Strasbourg France (live performances and seminars (in french only )
2018 Performative paper for CIST Reinventing places through art; rethinking art with space-CIST 2018 Rouen Université/ Paris Diderot Université France
2018 Island workout no.2 Université III Lille France (lecture (in French only) and live performance)
2018 Organ-Icon-Une aventure de corps Bureau D'art et Recherche, Roubaix France (Live performances with Residual element, and film projections )
2018 OKNO La Confection Idéal, Tourcoing France (live durational performance , residual installation element and window back-projections nightly)
2018 Restless Linings (group show with Robert Luzar, Joe Graham, Lucy O'Donnel) Wimbledon Space London (live performances and residual with residual element)
2017 Stitch Up commissioned for P/ROPS at NEST Ghent Belgium (performances, film screenings and adhoc installations) for Gent Matinees
2017 Island work out Coastal Currents Contemporary Arts festival, Hastings (Site specific live performance commissioned By Coastal Currents Arts Festival)
2017 Academic paper presentation -'Splace'-co-creating sites'- Drawing Conversations 2 conference - Body space Place
University of Coventry
2017 Close Encounters in collaboration with Sociologist Andrej Zeleniec/ Commissioned by The Stove Network Dumfries Scotland (public participatory walking events in public space/s)
2017 State of Line- A survey of contemporary Drawing The Artworks 1830 Gallery Halifax (films/ screenings and Live performances)
2017 Performative paper on 'Drawing as Elsewhere' at Drawing Matters Symposium York St John University
2017 Embodied Cartographies Curated by Fay Stevens Fringe Arts Bath 2017 Arts Festival (installation/ live performance)
2017 Launch of WHITENOISE a book of commissioned writing and interviews, published by Marmalade Visual Theory/distributed by Central Books at RIBA London subsequently featured at London Arts BookFair Conway Hall, London; BABE (Bristol Artist Book Event), Arnolfini Gallery Bristol
2016/17 Quadraturin La Confection Idéale Tourcoing France (Live performances and installations)
2016 Breathing Space Centre Culturel Balavoine, France in collaboration with La Verita Dance Company Brussels ends 16/12/16 ( wall drawings, live performances )
2016 Concept – Czong institute of Contemporary Art South Korea (films/ performance)
2016 The Prison Drawing Project, Dean road prison Scarborough Yorkshire (Live performances/ installation/film )
2015 WhiteNoise play vs purpose was presented as a paper at the symposium Drawing Conversations at Coventry University
2015 Scapelands Drawing Box Tournai Belgium (site-specific wall drawings Live performances and installations)
2015 WhiteNoise Centre for Recent Drawing London
Supported by ACE and UCA
2015 Gapfillers Briggait Project Space at Wasps Studios Glasgow (site-specific wall drawings Live performances and installations)
2014 Fax Karst, Plymouth curated by The Drawing centre New york (site-specific drawing installation)
2014 Subject to change Limbo Margate (site-specific wall drawings)
2014 Apparatus Escaut Architectures, Brussels (site-specific wall drawing installations)
2014 We are Oakwood Passage Stour Valley Arts, Kent (site-specific wall drawing installations)
2013 Warped Space Frost Art Museum Drawing Project, Miami Florida USA (site-specific Live performances and installations)
2013 OMON RA The Drawing Project IADT Dublin (site-specific wall drawing installations)
2012/13 Dromology- The Logic of Speed South Square Gallery, Bradford UK (group exhibition) with Jack Brindley (site-specific wall drawing installations)
Research awards
2020 ACE Grant
2017UCA Research grants for Drawing conversations 2 & Drawing Matters Symposia
2015 UCA Research grant for WhiteNoise publication (UK)
2015/16 Arts Council England, research and development grant for WhiteNoise residency and
exhibition at the Centre for Recent Drawing, London
2001,3,5 Arts Council England, research and development grant –Art in Romney marsh (curator)
2008,9 British Council – travel award Canada
Recent Published writing
2023 Paradoxical drawing- essay on visuality of invisibility Published by The Lowry Salford UK
2023 Drawing as an invisible present ICM international journal of drawing, Universita complutense da Madrid
2022 Pera flora fauna -Collateral event -Port -Venice Biennale Italy (publication /exhibition text)
2022 When the photograph breaks-photography and peformativity International journal of Photography
Recently published work
2021 Featured artist Performance drawing- new practices since 1945 Published by Bloomsbury Books 2021,22
2018 L'independant exhibition review Lille Haut de France France
2018 GLASGOW HERALD phil Miller / visual arts roundup
2017 A-N REVEIW 'Coastal Currents arts festival- developing a dialogue' Dany Louise
2107 Coastal Currents Arts Festival Sussex catalogue
2016 Exhibition catalogue The prison drawing project (ISSU online)
2016 Exhibition review The Prison Drawing Project Drawing research Theory Practice (journal) issue 2/7
2016 My process Featured artist for May 2016 Central Station Glasgow (online)
2016 Drawing Conversations #1 symposium Play V Purpose Published by Coventry University school of fine art
(digital/ online)
2016 WhiteNoise a Collaborative drawing project Drawing Research Theory (DRT) volume 1
Intellect Books January 2016
2015 Drawing Paper #8 featured artist Liverpool UK(online and print)
2015 WhiteNoise featured exhibition Top 5 shows to see in London - FAD MAGAZINE June
2015 Gapfillers Glasgow Herald Arts Section (April) - exhibition review Phil Miller
2013 We Are All Alternative Structures exhibition review A-n
2012 Decouvrir La Voix du Nord (newspaper review) France, November
2012 Une Point Jeté Deux Rives L'Indépendent (newspaper review) France November
2012 Decouvrir Exhibition catalogue published by Espace 36, France