Coloured pencil, graphite, charcoal and gum arabic on victorian ash
43 x 75 x 32 cm
Single channel video, colour; 00:10:32  

Headbowls is an ongoing project in which Robbie Karmel has made a series of turned segmented wooden bowls designed to be worn on the head and drawn on, printed from, modified, damaged, repaired, performed and reperformed. As participatory and performative objects the bowls are worn and drawn on collectively by the artist and audience.

The Headbowls provide a meditative space to observe, consider, and respond to perceptual experience—the shape and senses of the body, the weight of the bowl, interactions with others, and the tangled activity of drawing.

This iteration of the work presents two headbowls fused at the temple, creating an object that requires a second person to activate or play with. The work aims to embody a request for assistance, to share the weight of the object, and to collaborate in drawing and playing. Conversely, the Headbowls in this configuration are insular and myopic, a closed and potentially competitive or antagonistic engagement, reinforced by the videogame iconography that informs the helmet-ness of the Headbowls.

These objects are an invitation for social production of drawings that are ambiguous in their subject, object, author, and viewer. The collective Headbowl performative drawing invites people to access their tacit embodied knowledge and capacity for mark making and to collectively develop and share that understanding through the activity. These are objects that are played with, drawn on, broken, fixed, modified, pulled apart and put together again, and have no clear state of completion.

Viewers are invited to wear and draw on the Headbowls.

Image: Brenton McGeachie