Skip to content
1981
Drawing Disobedient Bodies
  • ISSN: 2057-0384
  • E-ISSN: 2057-0392

Abstract

I draw to recall the sensations of moving and resting within the landscape, images of place as translated through body, material and mark. In , gesture-driven mixed-media drawings fuse a lived, sensory experience of the natural geological environments of the American Southwest with the act of inventional mapping. While walking within the canyons, badlands and arroyos of the high desert, I gather clay, silt and soils to process into pigments in the studio. These pigments combine with my body’s gestured marks to map a memory of moving through place, a fragment of lived geological time. Drawing actions may echo geological processes of deposition, sedimentation and erosion. While not literal representations of place, the drawings reference geomorphological processes and evoke the surface of the earth as seen at altitude, with the viewer moving within and over the terrain. By physically walking the land, gathering soil and drawing with handcrafted pigments, I bridge the raw elements of the landscape with a gestural cartographic sense. This act of drawing is one of remembering the sensations unique to the experience of the flesh body within the lithic landscape, translating sense into a marked language of geological form. By using the soils gathered from the terrain as a self-referential drawing medium, the drawings invite a movement in both temporal and physical scale, a consideration of the history and context of the land embedded within the image, as well as the ground upon which one physically stands.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • The University of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences
Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/drtp_00141_1
2024-12-18
2025-02-11
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Anderson, Laurie (1982), ‘From the Air’, Big Science, USA: Warner Brothers Records.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Crowther, Paul (1982), ‘Merleau-Ponty: Perception into art’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 22:2, pp. 13849.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. McPhee, John (1981), Basin and Range, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964b), ‘Lecture: The film and the new psychology (1945)’, in M. Merleau-Ponty (ed.), Sense and Non-Sense (trans. H. Dreyfus, P. A. Dreyfus), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 4859.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Osterkamp, Waite R. (2008), Annotated Definitions of Selected Geomorphic Terms and Related Terms of Hydrology, Sedimentology, Soil Science and Ecology, Reston, VA: US Geological Survey Open File Report.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Schneckloth, Sara (2008), ‘Marking time, figuring space: Gesture and the embodied moment’, Journal of Visual Culture, 7:3, pp. 27792.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Schneckloth, Sara (2017), ‘The common gesture: Drawing in relation’, in A. Grønstad, H. Gustafsson and Ø. Vågnes (eds), Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing, New York: Routledge, pp. 12334.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Steiner, Rudolf (1916), ‘Toward imagination: The twelve human senses’, The Rudolf Steiner Archive, 20 June, https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/19160620p01.html. Accessed 4 May 2024.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Bachelard, Gaston (1969), The Poetics of Space (trans. M. Jolas), Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Bergson, Henri (1990), Matter and Memory (trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer), New York: Zone Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964a), ‘Eye and mind’, in J. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception (trans. C. Dallery), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 15990.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2013), The Pleasure in Drawing (trans. P. Armstrong), New York: Fordham University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1386/drtp_00141_1
Loading
/content/journals/10.1386/drtp_00141_1
Loading

Data & Media loading...

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error
Please enter a valid_number test