The Common Gesture collaborative drawings are created through a series of directives that cultivate drawn relationships between body, material, and surface, between visual layers of gestures, signs, and marks, and between individual drawing participants and their collective presence. As an experiment in guided marking, graphic gaming, and shared creative labour, the drawings investigate both the limits and the potential of orchestrated group drawing. In the context of phenomenological discourse, the Common Gesture is a site of intersubjective drawing experience, wherein the image is figured and refigured according to the spatial rhythms produced by the material gestures and design strategies of the makers as enacted within, and emerging from, the drawing itself. This essay charts the evolution of a Common Gesture drawing developed at the TRACEY Conference Drawing || Phenomenology: tracing lived experience through drawing held at Loughborough University in September 2017
