Life Drawing: visualizing identity through the body, is a course that provides opportunities for exploring diverse themes relating to the body in contemporary society.

This studio involves research into visual thinking from social, cultural, historical, and contemporary perspectives.

Each assignment will be a thoughtful and highly resolved folio piece. Crafting imagery is thinking through image making. Your practice-led research investigation will influence the direction of your assignments, creating conceptual connections between form and content.

Through practice-led research and material thinking we will engage with: The body in Art/representation and meaning, Anatomy, The body and perception: studies into phenomenology and the body, Body in the city, The gendered body, Body language and relationships, and The social body and the social politic.

The focus of this studio is image making for design. Engagement through material thinking will influence models of participation and methodology for this enquiry.

The expected visual outcomes will comprise: a series of three visual outcomes relating to the body that will form an archive, a suite of life drawing experimentations, and a studio knowledge object in the form of a printed concertina series.

Life drawing workshops, drawing and printmaking workshops that use our etching press, art and design lectures, visually related excursions such as a visit to the Harry Brookes Allen Anatomy Museum at the University of Melbourne, and various visits to the National Gallery of Victoria. Research, develop and apply visual outcomes for your topic in relation to identity and the body. Outcomes will be an archive of artefacts that may comprise: printed ephemera, small sculptures, and digital outcomes.

There are four studio deliverables for the semester:
Brief 1: Studio Knowledge Object: a suite of printed concertina publications that will include your life drawing and processes throughout the semester.
Briefs 2, 3 and 4: The Collective Body: a series of three visual outcomes relating to the body, that will form an archive.

De Mello, Margo. Body Studies: An Introduction. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2014.

O'Reilly, Sally. The Body in Contemporary Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009.

Price, Laura, and Harriet Hawkins. eds. Geographies of making, craft and creativity. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Designing Identity, Designing through Image, Designing Publications, Designing Disobedience