Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2020

This article investigates the ‘performative’ and how this concept is used in drawing today, particularly in using writing, performance and choreography to address relations between self and other as a gender. The investigation starts with the question ‘Who is it that draws and also writes?’ From this, a notion of the performative is investigated further in terms of how gender identities are claimed to be produced (Butler). This deals with deeper questions about who and what kind of subject engages in the drawing, writing and production of gender. The aim is to investigate an underlying problem that deals with where this gendered subject sits within global-market contexts of art and culture, where value is placed on doing, subjectivity and bodily action… when in fact these same relations produce pseudo-activity, alienation and abstraction; as Kunst (2015) asks, what does ‘performative’ mean today when art and capitalism are so closely related? The article concludes with comments about the role of the body in contradictory spaces, where relations between artists and spectators deal with a notion of ‘withdrawing’ and ‘doing less’.

This article focuses on my recent pen and ink drawings, which are multi-panelled works on paper dealing with wars, migration and political themes. They are contextualized in relation to a long career of disruptive themes, as well as the critique and celebration of cities and places through the employment of architectonic, mechanistic and landscape imagery. They are intended to function as visual metaphors for social, cultural and historical narratives. My subject-matter and the deliberate referentiality of drawn detail and semi-recognizable objects, constructions and spaces are discussed in relation to formal issues of texture, manipulation of space and perspectival ambiguity. These relate to some of the ideas about the strategies of making and the special status and properties of drawing that I formulated in my book The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Drawing, 2010. I suggest in conclusion that my life-long commitment to the austerity and economy of drawing reflects my early training in South Africa.

A reflective observation of a 40-year drawing practice (from the 1970s to the present day), from observational drawing in outdoor environments, to performing Driftsong sound drawings through place, leading to the author’s current concern, woandering to bridge drawing and painting in a pareidolian archaeology. Her practice, rooted for its first decade in observational drawing in outdoor spaces, intensified her awareness of the environment and led her to undertake a research degree investigating whether an interaction between the environment and the practitioner during the process of drawing could be identified. This review follows the author’s practice, highlighting essential influencers, including Linda Kitson, Charles Baudelaire, Jacques Derrida on Emmanuelle Levinas, Astronaut Chris Hadfield and Performance artist Phil Smith. Identifying how the development of the author’s understanding of the environment impacts on her drawing led her to question whether while making work in the outside environment, she may also impact the environment in return. The author later expanded this idea further to wonder if while we make drawings of the environment we may be drawn by the environment too. A significant conversation with her research supervisor the artist David Cross, in which he stated that mass displacement is ‘a defining condition of our times’, together with the planets approaching environmental catastrophe, prompted the author to give a paper proposing Psychogeography be updated to Reciprocalgeography, and that the stories of the journeys undertaken by those displaced persons be heard as a ‘gift for the common treasury for all’ (Gerard Winstanley 1649). This review concludes with a response to an invitation to write on the thinking and making of her current practice. The author, combining the physical, emotional and conceptual process of making, proposes to woander on a pareidolian archaeology, allowing serendipitous happenstance and the unconscious, to have a hand in the making process.

Exploring the lion as a symbol of England’s colonial past the drawings presented in this research project seek to subvert the idea of the lion as a symbol of power through the decorative interventions applied to them. The history of the lion as a symbol of British identity and strength in public monuments such as Trafalgar Square is compared to the ways in which owners of ordinary suburban housing in England use lion garden ornaments as indicators of habitus, or class (Bourdieu), and conspicuous consumption (Veblen). The act of drawing brings these ornaments into the ownership of the artist who employs a number of decorative interventions that seek to undermine the lion’s symbolic status. This is a speculative set of work created during the limbo of Britain’s Brexit negotiations in 2019. It has potential implications for anyone researching the relationship between ornament and identity, or drawing and ornament.

Navigating through three distinct sites of knowledge – the seventeenth-century treatise on Malabar’s plants, Hortus Malabaricus; historical herbaria; and protected areas of remote forests and coastal regions of Kerala – the project will stimulate innovative modes of drawing through considerations relating to the collection and preservation of rare plants. Generating a distinctive body of artworks at world-leading plant science research facilities and in the bio-diverse South Indian rainforest, the research asks: can drawing represent the vulnerabilities and resilience of rare plants, not through illustration and gathering information by creating marks on a substrate, but as a material phenomenon that can generate new knowledge?

The essay claims that a substantial part of contemporary drawing research has worked on the conceptual boundaries of what drawing is or when it takes place. It reports on a piece of public art on the limits of drawing that illustrates contemporary research issues based on drawings as elements or substantial parts of installations, public art, urban interventions, performances, unconventional media and materials. The piece – Arachne’s Loom – was an installation of 1500 m of black fibre-optic cable displayed across an artificial lake connecting a public library building to five computer heads. It was paired with a wind turbine blade placed in a public square – The Children of Eos – and the two together were presented under the title Hard Design. Curating this intervention was an opportunity to explore in a practical way issues that interweave the materiality/immateriality of graphic elements and that have been an important part of the author’s previous work. The wind turbine blade and cables installed in public spaces set up a number of polarities, two of which are relevant for drawing research: monuments vs. festivals and shapes vs. shapeless. Within the first polarity, a symbolic foundation for public art rooted in ancient myths is discussed. Particular attention is given to the power of Arachne’s myth as a cautionary narrative connected to the origins of both figurative and abstract drawing. Within the second polarity, in opposition to the wind blade’s distinct, ‘pure’ form, the rhizomatic structure of a web-like network of fibre-optic cables is explored in the context of drawing research. The text links philosophical rhizomes, real rhizomes, representations of rhizomes and visual allusions to rhizomes with public art, drawing, drawing as process, the World Wide Web and its extensions. The epilogue frames the piece within Nelson Goodman’s aesthetics, suggesting that further research into the work of this philosopher may open interesting paths for drawing theory.