This practice-led research project explores correspondences between political cartooning and drawing-based practices in contemporary art that embody cynical attitudinal gestures towards everyday political institutions, figures or discourses. I have emphasised drawing processes within an extended encounter with the viewer to broaden the idea of drawing-as-art-object and account for the trace of the artist as an artefact of a performed gesture in place and time. Accordingly, this project has a focus on the body, space as a dimension of the social and time as a dimension of change. I examine how art expresses political critique through modes of embodied gesture in the studio leading to grotesque depictions of the body in art works and extended encounters with the viewer in exhibitions. The outcome has been several bodies of artworks conceived in series, all engaged with graphic processes on paper, existing as artefacts of studio practice or as installations of wall works, table-based assemblages and architectural-scaled constructions. The aim of the project has been to research such critical modes within an extended field of drawing practice, firstly as the basis for a sardonic response to contemporary politics in and of itself and secondly, as a research method that suggests areas of new enquiry in the field of Australian political cartoon studies. New knowledge is expressed in two ways; in artworks themselves that embody the subject they examine and in an exegesis, whose summary conclusions derived from art practice as research contribute to the field of political cartoon study.
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