Rationale

 

The project 'Parental Conversations’ is an international research project involving artists who are parents volunteering to draw collaboratively with their children over the period of a year. Its overriding aim is to find ways in which the activity of drawing can be used to create dynamic space and time within the domestic sphere, to share and discuss familial interactions and explorations of the world.

 

To provide comparison between parental conversations, each artist/parent is given the same format to work with: a A5 Size Concertina Style sketchbook containing 70 pages of 140gsm white cartridge paper.

 

Each concertina book will be filled with ways in which drawing can be used to share and enhance experiences between parent and child; how drawing can be used as an externalization of thought and forum for exchange as well as a record of events.

 

In order to reflect a diversity of personal, social and cultural reflection, each artist/parent is placed in the position of responsibility to devise ways in which the act of drawing might be integrated into their particular family dynamic. They need to decide upon the nature of topics or events shared, the duration of each visual conversation; how notation of verbal exchanges notated (if at all) and how the contribution of parent and child is visually differentiated and aestheticaly composed.

 

Artist/parents have been selected for their aesthetic acruity or creative work with children and for being best placed to identify innovative methods by which to interact with children through drawing, as yet unknown. 

 

Overriding Aim:

 

The methods employed by the artist/parents will be used to generate a toolbox from which community based drawing workshops including parent and child groups, and innovative drawing pedagogies will be devised.