Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2022

In a series of tiny artistic experiments, I explore the relationship between drawing writing and performing in close collaboration with children and professional dancers. I examine the tight relationship between drawing and writing on the one hand, and the process of sensorial (non-linguistic) sense-making on the other hand. Professional dancers and children engage in the act of imaginal writing. The aim is to come to an embodied understanding of drawing and writing as gestural re-enactments of the line (Ingold 2016). In this paper, I first describe the scribbling of young children, as the exploration of the line in terms of rhythm, movements and affects. Then, the tight relationship between drawing and writing is discussed. It is argued that both drawing and writing use the line as its medium, since ‘the same sort of line which writes also draws’ (Gray in Ingold 2016: 132). This brings me to imaginal writing, i.e. a form of writing that is not concerned with the semantic content of words but instead takes the quality and dynamic of the line as its departure point. Imaginal writing is a form of draw-writing that taps straight into the lived experience. It is an embodied activity that takes movement as the main vehicle for the sense-making process. This process is illustrated by the draw-writings of both children (my own daughter as well as other children) and professional dancers.

The aim of this paper is to expose mapping as an original method of practice and research, striving to reveal its inherent performativity; to demonstrate its many possible applications within a creative process; and to open a line of enquiry on the production of signs (where the term sign is used in its broader sense as anything that conveys a meaning which is not contained in the sign itself). Mapping is here considered a particular instance of drawing: employed to portray the movement of bodies in space within the specific context of my choreographic practice and performance-oriented projects. My recent performance Invisible Cities is used as a case study to analyse mapping as a performative device and draw important conclusions on the meaning of performativity. The paper aims to show how this method has evolved over time from its original scope of documenting my creative process into a source of cyclical scores. The text outlines some practice-based, preliminary findings on maps as an object and on mapping as a process, using cognitive and anthropological theories that informed the method. It shows how the theory of metaphors and the notion of vitality affects influence the formation of signs in both processes of mapping/looking at maps, and moving/looking at movement. Finally, this method is suggested as a valuable approach to a wider category of practice and research related to drawing and performance.

For the past decade, my artistic research practice has explored the performative aspect of drawing. Recently, I have come to realize how the performative process can function as an experience of catharsis. By examining a selection of works from my practice, Cassils, Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta and Tracey Emin, that exemplify the act of mark making through processes of encountering intense states of the body, ‘Trace and catharsis: Embodied drawing’ explores the concept of drawing as the residue of performance. I will investigate catharsis as a performative gesture in itself – the release of internalized distress through acts of externalization and exertion. This gesture – immediate, impulsive and compulsive in nature – draws a direct relationship to Aristotle’s notions of catharsis and the bodily manifestations of anxiety that Sigmund Freud describes. Through Amelia Jones’s and Catherine de Zegher’s ideas of mark making, I will examine how traces produced by this gesture can be performative in its materiality and evocation of the artist’s body.

A structural model for drawing articulates the elements that come together to produce mark-making. This model was inspired by Choreology, the study of movement initiated by dance artist and educator Rudolf Laban in the first half of the twentieth century. Laban developed theories for movement to help dancers better understand the expressive potential of their bodies. His analysis, together with subsequent scholars, defines how the human body moves in space. In the way dancers and choreographers gain analytical skills and greater awareness of their movement choices through studying Choreology, so visual artists can gain a new understanding of mark-making and its relationship to the body by looking at drawing through the lens of movement theory. This project was carried out during my research in Creative Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, 2017–19. In the process of developing the model for drawing, I created a palette of marks by testing out a range of movements with different mark-making tools such as pens, pencils, watercolours and paint sticks. These marks correspond to Laban’s Effort Actions, a list of eight physical actions the body can make. The resulting artworks have a particular energy and visual language to them. Their creation is driven by the way the mark-maker moves their whole body in a choreographed drawing performance. Through physical actions, the mark-maker becomes aware that specific movements make specific marks. The appearance of these marks is influenced by the form and the effort of the physical movement, by the surface material, its orientation, and by the mark-making instrument and its colour. Designing a structural model for drawing has given me a deeper insight into the process of embodied drawing and performance, enabling me to make informed choices about the visual traces I create through moving my body in different ways.