Contemporary Australian artist Shaun Gladwell work Yokohama Linework combines two unlikely disciplines, skateboarding and the act of drawing. Yokohama Linework is a performance and video work which captures a sixteen minute journey as Gladwell rides his skateboard through the street of Yokohama, Japan. The video is taken from the skateboarders perspective we see what he saw on this journey. Gladwell says with this work he is attempting to “perform an experimental drawing or tracing in which I was both drawing and being drawn by road markings.”

The work which is said to connect to Baudelaire’s notion of the flaneur and the Situationists technique of derive which is suggested in the way in which Gladwell drifts through the cityscape as a detached observer.

This work is on loan from the Chartwell Collection, currently on long term loan at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. The Chartwell Collection is unique from other public and private collections in the country with a focus on contemporary Australian and New Zealand art.

This work was commissioned for the 2005 Yokohama Triennale.

Image Credits:

Shaun Gladwell, Yokohama Lineworks (detail), 2005.

Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2010

Image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery