Drawing Connections’ Murmuration – a two day mass collaboration in response to hARTslane’s programme, ‘Unseen and Unspoken’. Collaboratively artists will explore and interpret untold stories and unspoken realities with humble materials through expanded drawing techniques. The exhibition will allow the reticent to emerge or be chanced upon and reveal its true significance.

While the noun “murmur” means everything from “a whisper, a muttering, a burble, a hum or sigh”, a murmuration is a gathering of birds at dusk – hundreds, even thousands, of starlings flying together in a whirling, ever-changing pattern form murmurations before they roost. Murmurations could be aligned with other systems, such as crystals forming, avalanches, metals becoming magnetised and liquids turning to gases. These systems are “on the edge,” which means they’re ready to be completely transformed in an instant. Like the elements of these systems, Murmuration sees Drawing Connections, come together for this group show in which all members participate in a mass collaboration, each member connected and collaborating with every other member.

The artists will use the project space at hARTslane to make the work, initially bringing individually selected materials and tools into the project space. The mass collaboration at hARTslane is a new approach for Drawing Connections as until now their collaborations have been off-site, with no fixed time limit and in collaborative partnerships made by the artists based on friendships and crossover of artistic practice or concerns. Part of the rationale for this experimental approach, was to mix up older collaborations and create new partnerships and friendships, provoking new ideas and discussions. Within their collaborations, through the necessity of finding a meeting point between artistic practices, it is hoped that drawing will be challenged and expanded and taken outside the realms of established drawing practice.

Drawing Connections is a group of 25 artists who have chosen to work collaboratively through the medium of drawing as a way to challenge both their individual practices, and a way of further understanding of how artists communicate and collaborate. For them drawing exists as a tension between a clear, articulated form, an open expanded form, which shifts and continuously recreates itself, and the image and its viewer. By confining their activities to drawing they hope to broaden expectations and understanding of what contemporary drawing can be and offer a platform for collaborative drawing in its expanded forms.