Beyond Borders, Between Stories: Figure Drawing Workshop
Beyond Borders, Between Stories: Figure Drawing workshop” is an experimental, embodied, and experiential centered figure drawing workshop facilitated by painter and movement artist Odera Igbokwe in collaboration with Love Intersections. In this workshop participants have the opportunity to draw the figure in the classic format of gesture drawings and long poses of the nude and the draped figure. Additionally participants can experience and exercise their relationship to their own bodies, ancestral rituals, and their drawing practice as an extension of their embodied lived creative earth experience.
This figure drawing workshop honours the history of artist as muse, while envisioning collaborative futurities where artists and creatives expand the possibility of drawing while diffusing hierarchies and archetypal power dynamics that is too common in standard figure drawing.
Poster design and illustration by Slime Studio
Beyond Borders, Between Stories started with communal movement and embodied check-ins. We took the format of the cypher and shaped it for the needs of the artists in the room. Afterwards we warmed up with drawings prompts and games that focused on the participants co-creating.
Afterwards Odera facilitated and created a drawing session focused on gestures and longer poses. These poses centered drapery, fabrics and textiles, ritual, ancestor work, all in reference to the African diaspora.
To end the session, Odera welcomed participants to take a turn modelling. Each model was draped, welcomed into the ritual, and posed for the collective. Afterwards, Odera asked to pose with the participant in an effort to coordinate boundaries, to illustrate the consent of touch, and to diffuse the innate hierarchies of classical figure drawing.
