#clappingmusic

Following an April artist residency at Leland Iron Works, Linda Hutchins (PNCA ‘88) shares her research in Touch Stone: An Open Rehearsal at Pacific Northwest College of Art May 11-14, 2016. For Touch Stone, Hutchins will create a new drawing on site that incorporates the textures of one of the original marble columns in the grand hall outside the 511 Gallery at PNCA. Hutchins will work on site and answer questions 12:30-1:30 pm daily, Wednesday, May 11 through Saturday, May 14, 2016.

Hutchins draws with both hands, often all ten digits at once, sacrificing control for a direct reflection of body symmetry and dynamics. Percussive rhythm offers a motivation for her drawing gestures that is seemingly embedded in the body. Through it she strives for a kind of automatism, not the psychological automatism of Surrealism, but a structural automatism that reveals the inclinations and capacities of the physical self. She sees it as a form of figure drawing, a self-portrait from the inside out.

Touch Stone is also an open rehearsal in Hutchins’s ongoing project to bring the rhythms of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (1972) into her body, through both hands and all ten digits into her drawings. Hutchins first worked with Reich’s Clapping Music rhythms in 2013 for Echo Chamber, a site-specific wall drawing installation at littlebigspace in Albany, California. She returned to Reich’s rhythms in her residency at Leland Iron Works, incorporating new notational systems and compositional strategies in silverpoint drawings that straddle the line between drawing and rubbing. Silverpoint is a traditional old master drawing technique in which actual silver is used to draw on prepared paper. Hutchins’s practice of drawing with silver thimbles is anything but traditional.

Pacific Northwest College of Art is located at 511 NW Broadway in Portland, Oregon. Touch Stone is accessible to the public 9 am to 8 pm Wednesday, May 11 through Saturday, May 14, 2016. The artist will be present 12:30-1:30 pm daily. This project is presented by The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture,  Leland Iron Works and The Ford Family Foundation.