Avery has explored how ‘live-painting’ allows the painter to take on the role of scribe for multidisciplinary performances. She began developing a lexicon or notation system for combined music and dance performances during her artist residency at the Banff Centre from April to May 2017.

These paintings were created in ‘live-painting’ situations within the Art Crush setting; Art Crush is a multidisciplinary performance project that combines music, dance and visual art, compelling these three disciplines to share a space and create overlapping narratives.

The conceptual framework of her practice was to approach time-based and live painting (or mark-making) as deep-research sessions. The resulting paintings act like a score in reverse – they become visual transcriptions. They provide a visual dimension or archive to the viewer for the piece of music and dance being performed.

These visual transcriptions are presented in ‘scroll’ form, to give this idea of documentation, archiving, information storage and readiness to be opened up and ‘read’ again like a musical score or dance notation. The paintbrushes shown were developed and made for this practice.