Drawings not long for this world

THOM Buchanan has a remarkably relaxed attitude towards the fate of his work.

110811 worldhood

THOM Buchanan has a remarkably relaxed attitude towards the fate of his work.

Tonight in Adelaide, the artist will spend 90 minutes drawing large cityscapes on paper while a group of dancers moves around him. When the performance is over, the artwork will be destroyed in a process Buchanan says is beautiful.

"It makes me less precious about the work," Buchanan says.

"This is about the process; it's not about finished product. It's about seeing how a drawing is made and how I draw."

The performance is called Worldhood, a multi-art form project created for this year's South Australian Living Artists festival.

The choreography for 18 dancers is provided by Garry Stewart, artistic director of the Australian Dance Theatre.

By destroying the 2.5m x 9m charcoal work Buchanan creates during the show, Stewart says he wants to mimic human life and the decay of urban spaces represented in the pictures.

"Everything in the world decomposes, then reconstitutes again, and I wanted to get across the notion of impermanence in our built environment and organic world," he says.

The group of dancers, a mix of professionals and final-year students from Adelaide College of the Arts, destroys the final image by scrawling charcoal lines over the drawing. "Like everything in our world, it's eventually destroyed or written over the top of again," Stewart says.

Buchanan has embarked on similar projects before: for more than 10 years he has accompanied bands and DJs with his live drawing at music festivals such as the Big Day Out.

"Artists create stuff for art galleries, but you never get to see the process behind it," he says.

While dance and visual art are usually kept separate, Stewart and Buchanan see parallels between the two disciplines.

"In the simplest terms I create hundreds of marks on a space and dancers' marks are made with their body," Buchanan says.

Stewart says he sees a synergy in the movements of the dancer and his collaborator in Worldhood.

"The way that Thom draws, it's on a large scale so the act of his drawing is very robust and overtly physical, which lends itself to a choreographic context quite readily," he says.

Worldhood opens at Her Majesty's Theatre in Adelaide tonight and runs until Saturday.