Phantom Limn

Abstract

Phantom Limn is an International interuniversity practice based collaboration between artists whose work is focussed on drawing, formed by Mackintosh in 2015. They are Dean Hughes, Stuart Bennet, David Mackintosh, Kelly Chorpening, Rebecca Fortnum, Chloe Briggs, Mark Nagtzaam and Veronique Devoldere.
They have produced two exhibitions and one residency to date. This output is a residency at Dovecote Gallery in Edinburgh in July 2017 where the artists worked alongside each other in the gallery, making drawings fuelled by their own interests but also maintaining a responsiveness to the work being made around them. The artists are interested in how one might use drawing as a form of enquiry and tool to look but also an end in itself, an object whose surface imprints and reflects on the world. We are also interested in the idea of a collective work and the anti-conference where instead of giving papers artists make work.
All teachers of drawing within different University settings, the artists in Phantom Limn were interested in exploring the idea of instructions for drawing, which will allow them to reflect on the often implicit values that surround the pedagogy of drawing, and by extension, art more generally. The residency facilitated a speculative coming together of the artists to work for the first time, using the gallery as a studio, a conference room, a social space and a gallery. The artists constructed a large scale quasi-merz object which received the work as it was made, this became the physical manifestation of the theoretical framework and focus of reflection for the participants as well as the public. And it also functioned as the collaborative art object.
The dialogue of the group as well as the work produced became the focus of the visitor experience, they were invited in throughout the residency and encouraged to engage the artists in conversation. In this way visitors extended dialogue and facilitated a spontaneous forum where making and discourse happened simultaneously. The residency lasted a week and attracted approximately 500 visitors. It was funded by UCLAN, ECA, UAL and Dovecote.