Contagion

Contagion expands on ‘Drawing as Contagion’, a chapter included in the forthcoming publication A Companion Guide to Contemporary Drawing, edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum (2020). Contagion, like blackness and darkness, is considered a negative word but I can use this. Entering a space can be risky, having no control over what material will land on you, even if the trace is invisible. I think if my purpose is to try and work out how I can contribute to transformative justice visions and ethical practice in this world, the work asks me to center decolonization work and antiracism, to try and unpack and absorb theory around blackness, and what the charcoal I use in performance drawing installations does is implicate everyone in that blackness – like the idea of contagion. Contagion centers material that demand intimacies. Contagion is a meditation on refusals of containment or control and an exploration of care asking: What does it mean to survey and reclaim ‘environments’, our relationship to space, and where are potentials for reclamation and belongings?

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Image: Installation View. Jade Montserrat, Instituting Care. Courtesy of Humber Street Gallery and the artist, 2019. Photo by Jules Lister.