Drawing at the Adelaide Salon

It was a privilege to take part in some performance drawing at the Adelaide Salon on Saturday evening where work by The Baron Gilvan was on show. His art featured refrains of pirates, dots, stigmata and crucifixes, all grounded on a theatre stage, and made with black charcoal on canvas, so fresh and unfixed that charcoal dust rained down on the audience.

I found myself drawing at the feet of OldHagMusic, who sounded like a tree in the forest, in response to Bradley and his dancers tying themselves up in red tape, in inspired by his Exploding Appendix essay on Disrupted Rhythms.

The room was full of characters. My conversations centred on navigating the disrupted rhythms of our times, introduced in Bradley’s essay. Answers to the ‘dis-temporal’ sense of ‘feeling a long time dead’ were found in the jeweller who made mini-skull pendants based on real people’s skulls, to laugh in the face of death and live forever. Another artist created contemporary puppetry to supersize the ordinary and those going unseen. Vibrations in a teapot were an audible signal to the comfort of undertaking age-old rituals for wellbeing.

All the chaos was set to a backdrop of period cornicing, ornate fireplaces and black ironwork. My main take-aways were to manifest joy as a form of resistance and believe that art always was and always will be around to rescue us.