With her LIVE TRANSMISION drawings american artist Morgan O’Hara, born in 1941 in Los Angeles, partakes in an artistic development which allowed the medium of drawing to focus on process and movement since the 1960s.

Unlike the works of abstract expressionists who tried to capture their inner motions and emotions in painting and drawing, Morgan O’Haras powerful gestures are the result of a conceptual approach. With both hands and two or more pencils, the artist transfers movements in music, dance and everyday actions onto paper using drawing as a recorder of motion. This method assigns to the artist the role of a conductive medium through which the energy of the observed movement flows. One human action is translated into another. The drawings themselves retain this energy. They seem to be built around one or more centres that hold together the many movements like gravity fields. The visualization of elusive elements of movement leads to different time levels overlapping. Consequently the simultaneity of all gestures brought onto paper creates accumulations of graphite lines which seem to display their very own notation of the performed musical piece they are the witnesses of.
Thematically, the artist thus broaches several issues of drawing as an artistic means of transmitting information, such as the coordination of hand and eye as well as the associated process of perception itself which can generally be described as utterly subjectif. Precisely in this regard, the LIVE TRANSMISSION drawings are - despite their conceptual approach - also an expression of the artist herself. It is amongst other things this complex tension between rational concept and subjective performance that gives a particular appeal to these drawings.

The motion sequences in which O’Hara is interested are not limited to artistic performances. The documented actions are various: the artist observed aparagus pickers in the south of Germany, a japanese fish market as well as workers in a chinese noodle factory.