Doodle

Doodle / for BOM / 2020

Doodle is an online show from BOM, aimed at using games and play to get people drawing and mark-making in their own homes. It is running on the BOM website until 29 August.

As part of the show, BOM commissioned an online version of our drawing game Art Deck: a digital card game that invites people to draw in their homes, creating instructions online and then following them with whatever paper and materials they have to hand. I also reimagined some traditional parlour games into collaborative drawings that people could print out and play, and acted as curatorial advisor, helping the show’s curator Louise Latter put together a selection of great digital games that use drawing and image creation in interesting ways.

BOM’s original plan had been to put together a live exhibition running from early May to late August, showing several of these digital games alongside a massive real-life version of Art Deck that got people drawing together on the walls of the gallery, transforming the space over the course of several months. When the show moved online in response to the pandemic, we worked to figure out how to bring the same ethos of play and mark-making into an online show, aiming at a mix of digital and physical drawing. The four purely digital games shown (Andi McClure and Michael Brough’s Become A Great Artist In Just 10 Seconds, Jarryd Huntley’s Art Club Challenge, Jonah Warren’s Sloppy Forgeries and Lingdong Huang’s Doodle Place) all take very different approaches to getting people to create and think about art.

The online implementation of Art Deck was built by Terry Cavanagh. Doodle was curated by Louise Latter, and the website was created by Ben Neal.