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The Hokianga Community Drawing Project

“When we do not have the words to say something, drawing can define both the real and unreal in visual terms” (Kovats, 2007: p. 8).

As we come to witness the life-altering impacts that climate crisis is bringing to all our lives there is a need for exchange and dialogue to generate new connections and understanding between people and cultures. Climate change is forcing people to alter their perspectives and understanding around how they are living and its intrinsic link to wider social issues of housing, environmental degradation, access to public services and poverty.  Essentially our concept of home as the way that we live with each other in our environments is being regenerated through the impact of climate change.

According to Casey and Davies (2017), collective drawing has the capacity to ‘initiate relationships with environments and phenomena’. It uses the ‘visual voice’ in an arts-led, participatory method to yield culturally relevant perspectives (Yonas, Burke and Miller, 2013). Through processes of visual conceptualisation and subsequent reflective discussion participants are empowered to express, perhaps, hitherto unvoiced thoughts. To this end, the Hokianga Community Drawing Project sought to deploy the creative agency of collective drawing to achieve a non-textual rendition of how the climate crisis is affecting communities in the Hokianga.

The Hokianga Community Drawing Project took place with two communities located to the north and south of the Hokianga ferry link in the Northland region of Aotearoa New Zealand. This collective drawing project was delivered in the historic town of Rawene during a four-week artist residency in 2023, with the aim of uncovering lived experience connections between people, place and location. The intentions for this work were to re-envision the concept of home as the way we live with each other in our environments through the lens of climate change impacts.​

References:

Kovats, T. (2007). The Drawing Book—A Survey of Drawing: The Primary Means of Expression. London: Black Dog Publishing.

 

Casey, SM & Davies, G 2017, Drawing Out the Mute: Speaking Through Drawing. in J Journeaux & H Gorrill (eds), Collective and Collaborative Drawing in Contemporary Practice: Drawing Conversations. Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle. https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/124623/

 

Yonas MA, Burke JG, Miller E. (2013) Visual voices: a participatory method for engaging adolescents in research and knowledge transfer. Clin Translational Science. 6(1):72-7. https://doi.org/10.1111/cts.12028

 © 2025 by Laura Donkers

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