My intent in drawing is not to make a work on paper, it’s to move. Each time I place the charcoal on the page, I try to empty my body and just begin. As it becomes more involved in the drawing, the edges of my face, the time embedded in my skin, the rhythmic drop of weight against the floor, and the emotional tenor of the day—and much more—become marks on the page. The drawings aren’t figurative, they are representational. But the boundaries between the two are fluid, not fixed, and less articulate than we often imagine. — Gwen Welliver

Process notes:

Gwen Welliver is a dancer and choreographer who works across performance, opera, drawing, and writing. Since the 1990s she’s been tracing various manifestations of line in performance and visual art as a way to think about form in terms of transition. I am currently working with Welliver in support of the strategic planning of her interdisciplinary work. We began by archiving the physical materials that have emerged from her creative practice (rehearsal and performance videos, choreographic scores and methods, drawings, and writings). In May 2019, I gathered interviews with movement collaborators Stuart Singer and Kayvon Pourazar, tracing each narrator’s history and embodied reflections as part of dancing and collaborating with her. This process is designed to support the creative development of a series of new works, Movement Diptychs, enfolding the disciplines of dance and drawing into diptych compositions. As the culmination of this research and planning, I will develop a hybrid curatorial proposal bringing Welliver's work into new forms and possibilities.