Drawn out (2022) is one of Julie Rrap’s most recent performative self-portraits, the latest in a performative project that began almost fifty years ago.
The work, which is in effect a life drawing, comprises a video-performance of Rrap – shot from above, naked and holding a stick of Conté crayon – drawing on a large sheet of paper, moving under instruction of an unseen supervisor. Over a 12-minute period, Rrap’s body and the sheet of paper become covered in black marks as artist, body, sheet and drawing merge in a neat riposte to the way the genre of the nude, and life drawing in particular, usually position the artist and the naked subject. Together, the drawing and the video-performance produce a compelling, feminist self-portrait that is at once poetic and full of pathos. Key to the work’s disruptive power is the fact that this is the body of a 72-year-old woman, whose body we have looked at in the process of making art and ageing since the late 1970s.
