Figures of speech: Can conversation be a democratic mode of drawing?

Pattern-making is fundamental to our human consciousness; where it expresses form, place and meaning and is key to learning. Drawing is part of this impulse, as is language, speaking, dancing, movement, music, writing and other modes of gestural figure-making activity. In parallel with this, an increasing specialization and individualization in contemporary society means that one of our major challenges is to rediscover how we can work together and in doing so employ our innate creativity as human beings. This essay, therefore, is propositional in its description of the potential for language, through its patterns and gestures, as a form of drawing and a mode of democratic ‘art-working’ that is held in common. By eroding the distinction between speaking and drawing to form a larger category of embodied and communicative acts, the aim is to widen our current definitions of drawing and creativity in the social realm where speaking, conversing, gesturing and writing are part of our quotidian life and are vitally alive in human discourse from early childhood. The common element is pattern, generated by rules of language and of drawing that create form in their usage. This text will include a discussion of collaborative drawing and speaking works facilitated by the author in 2018 that begin to ‘draw out’ the forms inherent in the life of conversations that occur in moments of commonplace rituals, in this case an artist interview and a neighbourhood dialogue with the communal sharing of food. The essay concludes by raising the radical implications for drawing, the possibilities for extending its agency and that everyday conversation and the patterns of language, redefined as drawing, are democratic, generative acts that contain the potential to widen the terms of art and human creativity.