QUEER LIFE DRAWING with OHNI BLU & BLAKE LAWRENCE

Queer Life Drawing are proud to present an installation of sketches and drawings from our ongoing project, critically challenging the romantic ideals of the practice of life drawing and presenting an expansive portrait of a community. We are an amorphous workshop, popping up here or there, and focusing on queer representation, the empowerment of queer bodies and the telling of the stories behind them.Queer Life Drawing was founded in 2016 by local artists Ohni Blu and Blake Lawrence, after the realisation of a mutual love of life-drawing and a shared sense that there was a lack of visibility of queer bodies and bodies of difference in existing life-drawing spaces. Our models come from many backgrounds but generally share an experience of otherness, and are representatives of LGBTIQA + communities. They are large, scarred, tall, hairy, tattooed all over, lumpy, short and pierced. They have experiences of physical disability. They are of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. They are sex and gender diverse. They are sex workers. They are queer.

In 2017 Queer Life Drawing held workshops at the Museum of Contemporary Art, for Julie Rrap’s ArtBar, and moved into our most recent residence with the assistance of Carriageworks and the artists of Clothing Store Artists Studio, in particular Tony Albert. This brought a new energy to the workshops, and we have been joined by some of the resident artists. The installation will feature sketches by some of them, presented among many by our attendees who are new to drawing or committed to an ongoing learning. Covering as much space as we can, we hope to build an shrine to our little world, while also challenging expectations about life drawing itself.