The Wall as Support: Drawing Beyond Paper

For most of its recent history, drawing has been a practice of modest dimensions and portable surfaces. Sheets of paper, gathered into folios and bound into books, became the canonical carriers of the graphic gesture. The wall, by contrast, was treated as the place where a finished drawing might be hung rather than as a substrate in its own right. In the work shown across this site, the relationship is reversed. Architectural surfaces — plasterboard, concrete, brick, timber — carry the first mark, and the page is just one of many possible hosts. Drawing here becomes a way of measuring a room, a corridor, a façade, or a building that may only ever be seen once.

Alexandra Mawimbi's interest in representation, mourning, and living presence sits naturally within this expanded field. A line drawn directly onto a wall belongs to a place; it cannot be folded and carried home at the end of the day. What follows traces a small constellation of Australian and international contexts in which the wall has become a primary ground, and asks what that shift asks of the viewer, the institution, and the artist who commits to a surface that will outlast the making.

Surface, scale, and the architecture of the gesture

Drawing on paper is a quiet contract between artist and object. A sheet of rag paper, an etching plate, or a roll of Arches sits on a table and accepts marks at the speed of the hand. The wall changes every term of that agreement. It stands, it receives light from a particular angle, it carries the memory of previous occupants, and it resists being wrapped, rolled, or shipped to a regional gallery in Townsville or Launceston. For an artist who travels between Sydney, Melbourne, and studio residencies at places such as Bundanon or the Australian Print Workshop in Fitzroy, this matters. A wall drawing lives where it is made, and it has to be reasoned with rather than packaged.

Studio education in Australia has long prepared students for this negotiation. At the Victorian College of the Arts and the Sydney College of the Arts, the first year of a Bachelor of Fine Art usually includes a direct-mark assignment on raw plasterboard walls, where students reckon with drips, joins, primer, and the impossibility of revision. The lesson is ethical as much as technical: once the line is on the wall, it cannot be taken back. This foundation underwrites more ambitious wall projects in Australian practice, from the painted rooms of Janet Laurence to the architectural inscriptions of Jen Bervin and the slow graphite fields of Fred Therkildsen.

First Nations lines on Country

Long before European settlers arrived, this continent's oldest walls were already inscribed. In the rock shelters of Kakadu and Wollemi, in the Grampians (Gariwerd), and across the Kimberley, ochre, charcoal, and beeswax have marked stone surfaces for tens of thousands of years. The Wandjina figures of the north-west and the Gwion Gwion, sometimes called Bradshaw, paintings further south are not portable works; they are anchored to specific overhangs, waterholes, and songlines. They constitute the original and ongoing archive of wall drawing on the Australian continent, and any contemporary practice that works directly on architectural surfaces owes a quiet acknowledgement to this lineage.

In Arnhem Land today, painters such as John Mawurndjul and Nawurapu Wunuŋmurra have continued this tradition by working across the surface of bark, hollow logs, and the large rarrk-patterned panels now installed as architectural interventions in museums from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The bark panel, once mounted on a gallery wall, behaves both as a discrete object and as a fragment of a much larger skin. It teaches the contemporary viewer that a wall drawing is never really about the rectangle: it is about the relationship between ground, image, and the people who gather before it. For Mawimbi, whose concerns include representation and mourning, that continuity offers a model of how a wall can hold memory without becoming an illustration of it.

The domestic wall and the residue of lives

Step inside a nineteenth-century terrace in Fitzroy or a weatherboard cottage in Hobart's Battery Point, and the walls carry more than paint. They hold the marks of picture hooks pulled and re-driven, the ghosts of built-in wardrobes removed in the 1970s, the plaster scars left behind by televisions mounted across decades. Australian rental culture, with its short leases and frequent moves, means that walls here are unusually full of human residue. They are palimpsests of arrival and departure.

Several Australian artists have used this everyday reality to think about presence and its disappearance. Del Kathryn Barton has filled rooms with painted and drawn figures that swarm over dado rails and cornices, while Caroline Rothwell has overlaid architectural drawings onto interior walls as if the building were being slowly re-authored by someone no longer present. Patricia Piccinini's hyper-detailed interior murals ask a related question at another scale. These projects echo the deeper questions Mawimbi raises in her own practice: how a flat surface records the trace of a body, and what it means to work with that trace rather than against it. The wall becomes a ledger of lives, and the artist's gesture is one entry among many.

Urban skin and the porous wall

Australian cities offer some of the densest concentrations of unauthorised and authorised mural work in the Asia-Pacific region. Melbourne's Hosier Lane and AC/DC Lane have functioned as open studios since the 1990s, while Sydney's Newtown, Chippendale, and the laneways behind Central Station host rotating programs of large-scale painting commissioned by the City of Sydney and private developers. In Brisbane's West End, in Fremantle, in Adelaide's Leigh Street and Peel Street, the line between street art and gallery drawing has grown increasingly porous. Artists whose names began in these streets — Blak Douglas, Fintan Magee, Adnate, Rone, and the collectives behind the Wominjeka year-round mural trail — have moved into museums while continuing to scale up.

This porousness is significant for a discussion of drawing on walls. A street mural in Collingwood or Waterloo is no less a drawing than a sheet from a sketchbook; it is simply a drawing that has accepted the building as its paper and the building's tenants, neighbours, and council officers as its audience. When such works are later protected by heritage overlays in inner Melbourne or commissioned for the façade of a regional hospital in Warrnambool, they enter a slow negotiation with the permanence of architecture. Mawimbi's interest in living presence is well served by this context: the wall drawing is a thing that has to keep negotiating with its host, whether that host is a private house, a council-owned wall, or the curved interior of a contemporary gallery.

Institutional surfaces and the curated wall

Australian institutions have shaped the reception of wall drawing in distinctive ways. The Museum of Contemporary Art on Sydney's Circular Quay has, since its relocation to its current building in 2012, programmed ambitious wall-based commissions that respond to the building's harbour-facing glass and raw concrete. Carriageworks, in the former Eveleigh railway yards, offers industrial brick and steel surfaces that have hosted extended drawing and projection projects by artists from Helen Grogan to Tony Albert. In Melbourne, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Gertrude Glasshouse, and the Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square have all supported wall works that push the boundary between object and architecture.

This curatorial interest has also extended to the biennial cycle. The Biennale of Sydney's use of Cockatoo Island, with its vast sandstone walls and convict-era chambers, has invited artists to treat the site itself as a substrate, while the TarraWarra Biennial, held in the rolling landscape of the Yarra Valley, has repeatedly commissioned wall and floor interventions that respond to the building's rammed-earth and timber interior. Such projects propose that the wall is the drawing, and the exhibition is the act of looking at it. The museum, in this reading, becomes less a frame and more a co-author.

Drawing that breathes past the wall

The most adventurous recent work in this field has begun to push wall drawing past static mark-making into sound, light, and time. In Melbourne, the duo Haines & Hinterding have wrapped gallery rooms in slowly shifting projected line that responds to ambient vibration and the room's own acoustic signature. Sydney-based Kate Beckingham has worked with bioluminescent cultures to draw images that glow, fade, and reappear across plastered surfaces. Across Perth, Brisbane, and Hobart, regional art centres have begun supporting projects where the wall becomes a temporary score for performance, with traces left in chalk, tape, or charcoal that are then photographed before the wall is returned to white.

For Alexandra Mawimbi, this trajectory resonates with the multidisciplinary practice visible across her archive. Sound, performance, video, and the drawn line are not separate categories here; they are layers of the same question. A wall drawing that includes a recorded voice, a faint chalk outline, or the residue of a performance gathers several kinds of presence at once. The viewer, standing in front of it, is asked to read marks as living signs rather than representations. That, perhaps, is the strongest argument for taking the wall as ground rather than as backdrop: it lets drawing stop pretending to be a window onto something else, and instead become the thing itself.

If you would like to experience how these ideas take shape inside a single practice, the works on this site are a starting point. Recent exhibitions, video documentation, and studio notes are updated under the news section, and a visit to the artist's studio in Sydney or to any of the partner venues around Australia can be arranged through the contact page.