Practice · Format
Portrait Booth
Portraiture as encounter.
Portrait Booth is a participatory format in which visitors, artists, residents and members of the public sit for short portrait sessions. The portraits are made within a limited amount of time. They are not intended as highly polished likeness studies; the objective is to identify the sitter quickly: a posture, an expression, a silhouette, an attitude, a gesture, a defining feature.
Each portrait becomes both an artwork and a record of an encounter.
The booth has no curtain. The sitter watches the portrait arrive, and so does whoever is standing behind them; the queue is usually watching before it is sitting. That is the point of the format: not a show, but a drawing made in the open, close enough to see every line go down.
The format runs during open studios, exhibitions, festivals, art fairs, community events, residency programmes, performances and informal gatherings. Within a residency it documents residents, visitors, collaborators, neighbours and people passing through the building, and grows into a portrait archive of that community.
