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The 43 Uses of Drawing. Co-curation of group exhibition.

Between 6 September 2011 to 30 October 2011 the group exhibition The 43 Uses of Drawing was held at the Rugby Art Gallery and Museum in Warwickshire. Significantly ambitious in scope, the majority of the 43 contributors had international standing and were at the forefront of developments within their respective professions. The curatorial premise of the exhibition was to examine the cross-displinary status of drawing as a form of visual communication and included contributions from a set designer, a choreographer and a plastic surgeon. Staff’s particular contribution to the exhibition stemmed from the research he undertook which was keyed into the idea of drawing as both a performative and diaristic/archival act. To this end, the works he selected and curated articulated this understanding of drawing within the exhibition as a whole and included Veronica Lawlor, 9/11 Drawings and Morgan O’Hara’s LIVE TRANSMISSION: movement of Fukuda-san, Japanese scissors grinder at work. Prior to this exhibition, Staff had co-curated an exhibition that was staged at the Avenue Gallery at the University of Northampton in September 2008 that was entitled Without the Walls Which Do Not Last. On one level this exhibition, that included contributions from the architect Will Alsop and the politcal cartoonist Martin Rowson became a testing ground for a set of research questions that subsequently fed into the curatorial rationale of The 43 Uses of Drawing. Specifically, Without the Walls Which Do Not Last presented the researchers with a dynamic research base which was organised around the cross-disciplinarity of drawing. In addition to this exhibition, a series of papers were co-authored and co-delivered, including “Of Blood, of Trade, Authority, Agency: Sought After Forms and Drawing Today” delivered at the Association of Art Historians annual conference held at the Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, 4 April 2009. The critical response the exhibition engendered included an exhibition review that was published on 14 September 2011 by the fine art periodical Studio International.