BROOKE LEIGH

UPCOMING JANUARY SUMMER WORKSHOP:

TUESDAY 19 JANUARY

VENUE: NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JEWISH WOMEN – WOOLLAHRA

expressive mark making with mixed media

This workshop is an introduction to expressive and experimental drawing.
Students will discover how drawing and music can be used to express and connect with nature.
By engaging four senses––sight, touch, smell and sound–– students will undertake a series of mindful exercises to inspire their drawings. (Think: shells, sand, the sound of waves…)
Students will be challenged to let go of judgement and control in order to embrace freedom, creativity and play
Listen to Brooke perform a selection of flute pieces that are evocative of nature and inspired by the season of summer, to drive your body movement and mark making. Can you trace the sounds? Capture the music on paper?
Embrace: the fluidity and immediacy of watercolour paint and mark making
Feel: liberated, inspired, connected, grounded, calm, reflective
Create: an energetic and summer infused mixed media artwork for a special space at home or a loved one

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Develop an understanding of abstract expressionism, performance art and how artists embrace improvisation, movement and focus on process over outcome
Learn how to practice mindfulness by observing, describing and participating
Learn how to work with mixed media–– layering wet and dry mediums.
Explore the relationship between two forms of artistic expression: musical composition and visual art

Brooke is a multi-disciplinary artist from Sydney whose practice explores the performative aspect of drawing. Leigh understands drawing through Catherine de Zegher’s definition that ‘drawing, through its qualities of fluidity and immediacy, is a process that is always in stages of becoming.’ Over the past seven years, Leigh’s work has evolved from gestural charcoal drawings influenced by interests in surrealism, abstraction and the unconscious to encompassing live performance, video, audio, photography, textile, object and installation. Her work investigates how the performative act can become a cathartic experience for internalised distress and suffering. In this sense, catharsis becomes the catalyst for understanding and acceptance. Supported by the Royston George Booker Scholarship for overseas research, Leigh was a Master of Fine Arts student and visiting scholar at LUCA School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium for twelve months.

In 2016, Leigh presented her first live performances (‘BEGIN’ and ‘Fracturing Silence’ at Croxhapox, Ghent), drawing collaborations (‘Chalk Dialogue’ and ‘mE/Us’ at Draw to Perform Symposium, Crows Nest Gallery, London), participated in International Performance Art Venice 2016 (The Praxis of Performance Art mentored by VestandPage), and featured as a ‘Šilainiai Project artist-in-residence in Kaunas, Lithuania. Informed by these experiences, she published as author ‘Moving Marks’, in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 39:1, Cambridge: MIT Press (2017); and ‘Time Trace: A drawn perception’ in Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 1:2, Bristol: Intellect Books (2016). In 2017, Leigh was awarded with a Master of Fine Arts by Sydney College of the Arts for her thesis and project, ‘Drawn-Out: trace and catharsis’. Live and documented iterations of Drawn-Out have been featured in exhibitions such as MCA ARTBAR curated by Julie Rrap (2017) Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; New Contemporaries (2018), SCA Galleries, Sydney College of the Arts; and Dobell Drawing Prize #21 (2019) at National Art School.

In December 2019, Leigh graduated from a two-year Dialectical Behaviour Therapy course. Foregrounded in mindfulness practice, the experience of this expanded her understanding and awareness of emotion, the human body and connection. Leigh has exhibited and performed in Australia, Belgium, Lithuania, Italy, Spain and the UK.

WHAT MESSAGE/FOOTPRINT DO YOU WANT TO LEAVE IN OUR WORLD?

By cultivating validation, awareness, reflection and understanding, I seek to challenge social behavioural responses of judgement, discomfort and intolerance.

WEBSITE: https://brookeleigh.com