f Drawing and the street texts of Chapeltown

This paper is a meditation on a field text that explores the concept of the sentient street. The graffitied walls of Chapeltown, a multi-cultural area of Leeds, a Northern English city, talk to an artist embedded within its community and these street texts give rise to drawings that embody that experience. Chapeltown has been a home to various and shifting populations over the last 100 years and during this time its walls have often been a support for the words of street poets, especially those that have messages that go beyond the traditional graffiti tag. Walking through these streets as he draws, an artist meets people and talks to them and their stories become additional texts that can be used to provide narratives to support the development of post-situ drawings. The streets themselves have their own voice and it is this voice that gives the artist’s post-situ drawings their charge, a voice that gives poetic shape to the drawn image. This article seeks to follow these street texts and their affect. Nancy’s concept that a drawing does not become information, but a sense, is used as a guide and as a series of interjections as to the way textual information becomes embedded into the feeling tone of a drawing.