Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2020

Over the last few years, I have become increasingly interested in how the material power of dust can be explored through the affective process of drawing to generate a new way of looking at the inevitable disintegration of the material world around us. This paper will discuss a body of drawings and prints that show how art and science have very different ways of investigating and communicating with the world around us. I am looking to science to provide an image, a particular view of the world, generating otherwise inaccessible information, but I then use a material art practice to incorporate things that are beyond the reach of science, things that science cannot engage with – the emotional, irrational, imaginative and historical ways in which we live. The body of work under discussion emerges from a research project undertaken in collaboration with an expert in the field of scientific imaging and analysis to examine particles of dust. The project considers dust as an overlooked and valuable material archive that can speak in a new way about human history and our material lives. Using state-of-the-art scientific technologies, I am able to make visible otherwise invisible particles of dust, the material that persists and remains, the omnipresent evidence of past existence. Key to the project is how the technological image that emerges from scientific analysis looks unlike anything we ordinarily see around us. The technology used to produce the scientific image creates something that seems distant, disconnected from our experience. It is this disconnection that drives me to use the slow pace and the tactile, material body of graphite drawing to transform the image using the eye and the hand in order to reconnect it with a more human, understandable way of knowing about the world.

This article describes the development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that monitor a painting or drawing evolving in real time and produce musical notes that relate to the individual elements of art as the artwork develops on the canvas. The article describes the practical approach required to capture the artwork unfolding in real time and then describes the framework used to develop the correlations between visual art and music. The AI technique exploits these areas of similarity within the two distinct artforms in order to respond to the live-painted elements and produce musical notes that reflect the development of the evolving artwork. A prototype of this system was implemented in a live stage performance at Aberdeen May Festival 2019 whose narrative centred on the question Is AI good or bad? Other outputs of this project are a 20-minute film and a body of (tangible) visual artwork for digital platforms and gallery environments informed and inspired by AI. The integration of these disciplines through AI transforms a static artform into one that is dynamic, interactive, transformational, transient and temporal.

This article reflects upon an artist residency at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, hosted by Parkinson’s disease research. It examines three distinct ways in which drawing methods and the prints they generate respond to the medical research. First, drawing methods mirror practices of looking and visualizing in the research laboratories. The relationship between datasets, algorithms and the images they generate is explored to propose the unstable nature of visualizations. Second, the artist’s original drawings are destabilized and transformed into ‘mutants’ to mirror the genetic mutations that are at the heart of the research. By substituting artworks for scientific images in a public-facing event, scientists enact the uncertainties and ambiguities of interpreting visual material. Finally, visitors interact with a print installation to mirror and enact scientific practices of selecting, categorizing and searching for patterns to emerge in visualizations.

The article presents and discusses an observational approach to drawing, where the objective is to articulate some features of visual perception implicated in and by the drawing process. Besides drawing, the author recorded such investigation through an action camera placed in front of his eyes and simultaneously recorded his spoken comment on the activity. The camera became the principle motif of the drawing, along with observation of certain operative biological features of perception, especially binocularity and peripheral vision. The article reflects on a first drawing involving three layers that simultaneously generated three videos and monologues. A second drawing was then developed from a more knowing stance, based on the considerations raised by the first drawing. Of such considerations, these were principally the question of timeframe, framing of experience, procrastination and doubt and, as it were, disengaged focus. The theoretical bases of the latter were founded in part on the author’s existing knowledge brought to the first drawing, and in part explored in the second drawing through what reflection on the article’s question had raised during its development. While the spoken monologues were intended to shed light on the objective of the drawings, consideration is given to how they also shaped the drawings. Sections of the monologues as transcripts are shown in relation to video screenshots and discussed for their contribution to the drawings.

This project report outlines ongoing collaborative design research that addresses aspects of architectural drawing, in particular scale and time. This project is discussed through the lens of the inhabitation of drawing: in both the making of, and encountering, drawing. ‘Drawing the Room | Drawing within the Room’ (2019) couples projective drawings with post factum documentation – or creative post-occupancy data – of built houses. Using motion capture technology, the movements of inhabitation are captured and translated to line work animations. The resulting drawings of inhabitation are projected full-scale, exhibited in the space of the architectural office, the site of conceiving and production of both drawings and architecture. Using the architectural office as the space of installation and exhibition presents a practice for acknowledging and engaging with these spaces of creativity, beyond casting the office as commercial space. The project explores contemporary performative drawing practices within architecture and considers the ways in which bodies and drawings interact. This work highlights the fundamental importance of lines within architecture, not as demarcation, divider or indexical references, but as temporal traces of bodily movement.

This paper presents a practice-based research project that explores archival material documenting data collection in nineteenth-century astronomy and locates drawing as a point of access into the shift from human- to technology-dominated methods of observation and representation. I focus on two works that use drawing in contrasting ways. First, by adopting marks from handwritten logbooks as a form of drawing that is laser-etched onto mirrors to highlight the under-acknowledged work of women ‘star measurers’. This technique of remediating drawn lines references both the scientific discourse and the social framework that structured the women’s work, and I use a technique of light reflection to illuminate the absence of their identity in previous narratives of this history. The second line of inquiry is based on written descriptions of double stars. Using hand-drawn animation, I have forged a connection between human and machine interpretation and description of astronomical phenomena, to investigate the involvement of multiple authors in this process. These works provide material explorations into the shift between manual labour and machine automation to illuminate the human traces of expression that are embedded into technological processes. I propose that drawing in combination with other media can offer insight into this increasingly entangled and complex relationship for both artistic and scientific discourses.

This project aims to discuss drawing as a method of bridging the void between digital imaging technologies and physical drawing in the fine art domain. It does so by investigating the role of drawing and printing in contemporary portraiture. Drawn and printed silkscreen portraits are made from a synthesis of graphite marks, digital pixels and water-based ink deposited on paper surfaces. The practice-led research described here explores the materiality of the emergent image when drawing is impressed on an electronic media trace. This investigation is timely in the context of the unprecedented impact of digital technologies on contemporary culture that tend to displace the physicality of drawing. By taking an approach to portraiture whereby artist and sitter do not meet in person, the project initiates a portrait of Ed Ruscha using the medium of video images. Digital electronic images held pixel by pixel in smartphone camera and computer hard disks are interpreted into physical drawing environments to make an expressive representation of a human form. Tactile gestural mark-making is contrasted with electronic imaging to create a pensive image where techniques are blended. The process and methodology are described, and the artistic outputs are shared across the globe through digital and analogue communication systems.

This research project explores the different ways in which mechanical and manual methods of drawing provide a visual encounter with birdsong. Bruyninckx (2018) has documented historical comparisons of spectrogram analysis and manual music-based graphic transcription in the field of ornithology. Moving away from the field of ornithology in the context of artist research, this project provides a comparative analysis of drawing processes between machine and human. Specifically, between a spectrogram depicted in Audacity®, manual notations and printmaking from encounters with birdsong recordings in the natural landscape. This research aims to explore how drawing from encounters with birdsong in the landscape informs how experiences with sound are visually interpreted. In doing so, I highlight the limitations of and similarities between the two different modalities of drawing. Specifically, I compare drawing processes in the mechanical empiricism of the spectrogram and manual gestures created during moments of perceived embodied experience. The comparative analysis considers how each drawing process articulates the complexity and ephemerality of birdsong. It investigates whether it may be lost or conversely made tangible through the different forms of transcription and composition. Whilst phenomenological theory often underpins investigations exploring embodied experiences, it was not feasible to include it into a research project of this size. Instead, there is potential to build on aspects of phenomenology in future research. In doing so, it can expand on the drawing methods and findings of embodied encounters with the natural landscape. This project has stemmed from my doctoral research that interrogates transposition between the auditory and visual through natural and musical interpretations of birdsong. Transposition as a site of an embodied encounter is explored via my painting practice.

As part of the award-winning Big Anxiety Festival in Australia, an exhibition of mixed-media drawings of plants and seeds was displayed at the University of Sydney, at the same time as two public drawing workshops in the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. This paper describes and summarizes the various drawing techniques used in these workshops, and discusses the feedback from participants, who self-identified as having anxiety. Drawing using different types of approaches allowed workshop participants to mediate their tacit knowledge of the symptoms and solutions of living with anxiety, and to transition to a lived experience of proactively using drawings to improve their individual cognition, mindsets and mental health. Utilizing the platform afforded by the promotion of Mental Health Month in New South Wales, allowed the drawing exhibitions and workshops to be understood more broadly within an interdisciplinary context, which embedded their impact on other fields of research, including ecopsychology and biophilia, in a salutogenic model of practice. Specific to this approach, a ‘sense of coherence’ was deliberately embedded in both of the workshops’ sequential drawing exercises, which were observational and objective in intent. The exhibitions in 2017 and 2019 also consciously deployed a ‘sense of coherence’ in their design. Documentation drawings have recently been used as a tool to alleviate anxiety and promote wellness in medical staff working in a UK Emergency Department during the COVID-19 pandemic. This demonstrated the widespread potential applications for drawings to provide an antidote and a method of communication to proactively and positively assist mental health. Further research and exploration of the role that drawing plants and nature can play in the construction of learning in the context of individuals struggling with anxiety may offer routes to new knowledge and better understanding and potentially enhance connections between art and health researchers and institutions globally.

By accepting that an ageing body and its memories are simply a conglomerate of materials moving from one state to another and that drawing materials can be thought of as operating in parallel to this acceptance, drawings are made that can be read as visualizations of the ageing process. The experience of the ‘self-feeling’ of ageing is entangled with Deleuze’s idea of ‘the fold’ in order to develop a personal understanding of how one’s own thought can be taken ‘into’ the thought of another and how a conversation can enter the mind of others as a material entanglement.

A measured drawing, by definition, includes the existing condition of the historic building, including graphical notes of alterations, additions and subtractions occurred during the lifetime of the edifice. These particular graphical records annotated with notes and surface measurements inform heritage conservation and research activities. When conducting research on the built environment, repairing a historic material or restoring the building to a significant phase in its life, measured drawings provide the analytical information for physical interventions. With the proclamation of Republic of Turkey in 1923, the nation state became the major steward to protect architectural heritage in a landscape tainted with decades of wars. Measured drawings were prioritized as scientific tools for repairs, physical interventions and methodical classification of historic properties. What has been taken for granted as scientific documentation, however, suited context-independent and historically constructed interpretation of building forms and traditions. Fuelled with the implementation of Turkish History Thesis, the contents of measured drawings could not escape from the formalist understanding of nationalist historiography. The drawings became idealized depictions of perfect monuments, rather than an acute graphical replica of ailing built environment. Reading measured drawings as a graphical arrangement of formalism, this article addresses the early republican desire to invest the built heritage with nationalist inquiries.

Review of: Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice, Marian Macken (2018)

London: Routledge, 186 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47248-323-2, p/bk, £42.99