Drawing using tape

 WARNING TAPE TILE: An Essential Underground Cable Protection Solution

Drawing

As it's getting close to Christmas, I thought it perhaps time to think about drawings made with adhesive tape. You will no doubt use a lot of it over the next few weeks, but as always we need to ask the question what are its possibilities as a drawing material for artists? 

Tape as a medium appears amongst a variety of artists' practices and can serve a wide range of functions.  

Jim Lambie

Jim Lambie uses tape for its decorative qualities, as well as its ability to stretch across large areas of floor space. Tape is often used to traverse architectural space, its a lot easier to work with than paint, there are no drying times and when worked with carefully the thin lines can have an almost mesmeric effect. The hallucinatory quality of the zig zag pattern has been recognised by many cultures, Lambie's use being not that dissimilar to the way Australian Aboriginal peoples used this pattern. Dance cultures can range from hip-hop to the 10,000 year old dances performed at the Laura Aboriginal Dance Festival, the zig zag often accompanying these dances as their visual cousin.

Aboriginal Wunda Shield

The Polish artist Monika Grzymala uses tape to explore architectural space in a variety of ways. Sometimes she is using tape to create barriers, at other times to wrap surfaces or to join elements, then at other times she is using it to make a more decorative surface and at others to create a narrative. Look at the way she cuts tiny shards out of the tape to create an explosive effect.

Monika Grzymala 

The Korean artist Sun K. Kwak, uses a scalpel to cut more organic shapes and lines through her taped wall surfaces. She will have researched different tapes and produced several trials and tests before deciding on the tape used. Tape comes in a wide variety of thicknesses and in particular some industrial tapes are worth researching for their colour and surface qualities alongside their availability in large amounts and wide formats.

Sun K. Kwak

Edward A Burke

Edward A Burke uses tape more like a traditional painting medium, each piece of tape operating as if it is a brush stroke of paint, whilst Alex Menocal creates wall drawings in a similar way to Michael Craig-Martin. His half taken down image below is of particular interest because of the way it reveals the process of its making. The hanging tape becomes the drawing, so we switch our reading from tape as something to help us paint straight edges to something that can be used much more directly to make the artwork.