Acts of Translation Residency

About

Acts of Translation is a month long public programme of events curated by London Drawing Group aiming to help people engage in the playful, unpredictable nature of making art and promote the joy of drawing through a series of free workshops, talks and exhibitions.

Learning Through Doing.

We learn early on as artists that when we copy or imitate the work of another artist, we are participating in an act of translation: learning through doing. Taking our starting points from those that have come before us allows us to translate timeless ideas into our own visual language, and through this act of translation, we learn as much about ourselves as artists as we do about our subjects, our processes, what engages us about them, and the act itself of making art.

Our first week of workshops will take as their starting points images from our initial exhibition; with the guidance of our Artists and Tutors, the participating group will be encouraged to make art in response to these images, thereby beginning the act of artistic translation. The artworks created in the first workshop will then form the basis of our second workshop and so on and so forth throughout the month, thereby creating an entirely new series of works made by members of the community, encouraging and forging links between one group of artists and the next.

The workshops will comprise a diverse range of teaching methods and drawn from both our collective artistic history and contemporary art-making techniques, ranging from sculpture, collage and traditional life drawing to live music-scores, performances, film and animation.

The works created throughout the residency by members of the community in response to our three exhibitions will then go on to be showcased in a final Community Exhibition which all workshop participants and the public will be invited to attend. We hope that this act of communal creation and collaboration will both inspire people to keep creating art, and to feel empowered to engage with the thriving artistic community that already exists in the borough.