Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2022

This paper makes critical reflections on a performance titled The Partly Present Mother, which traced acts of nurturing and loss at the Kosar Contemporary Gallery, Bristol, in 2019. The research reflects upon the silence of pregnancy without birth or ‘miscarriage’ as a Matrixial space, where the union of both mother and other are in flux. This changeableness or uncertainty embedded within the maternal is critiqued by making parallels between the becomings of drawing and mothering by positioning them both as verbs or acts. Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind and the Greek myth of Pliny’s shadow are used to consider loss as interwoven within drawing practice, where the corporeality of drawings practices wavers amidst discovery and loss. The project takes these experiences of loss answering Cixous et al.’s call to ‘write the body’, performing them through touch and repositioning textuality as live and physical. The parallels of becoming imbedded in the acts of drawing and mothering look to Elena Marchevska’s (2019) notional of the maternal as a verb and the process of becoming subjectivity as embedded within drawing (Bryson 2003; Fisher 1998; Naginski 2000; Sawdon and Marshall 2012)to reclaim the flux of the maternal notwithstanding pregnancy without birth.

Materials are a vital collaborator in building human and non-human worlds and yet are often cast as simply assistants or props in art practice. This project report looks at an experimental drawing exercise, which gives non-traditional drawing materials a crucial position in the drawing and mark-making discipline. This exercise is part of a larger methodology that seeks to give materiality a more central role in wider arts practice in order to bring individual material or object into a closer working relationship with the artist. Through such practices we can learn more about our material collaborates, from how matter reveals itself when used as a mark marker to how tacit and sensorial knowledge can be developed between material and artist. The drawing exercise, which is explored in this report, utilizes alternatives to the traditional tools of drawing practices (e.g. pens, pencils or brushes) to explore how material can be used as both illustrator and illustrated to develop a deeper relational knowledge of the materials which surround us. In recent theoretical, political and technological fields, through movements such as New Materialism, the role of materials in research is being re-examined and this report applies this call for a more collaborative relationship with the material world specifically to art and design pedagogies. This approach has the potential to transform our knowledge of specific materials through personal sensorial experience and an acknowledgement of material’s own vitality, and I have already witnessed something of the realization of this in my own practice.

I am proposing that a sound can exist as a drawing in its own right. How can sound be seen and could drawing be used to render it visible? Could a drawing be made of an invisible residue, for example, of a sound created by the wind? I have asked these questions through making ‘sound bows’ – a series of devices activated by air currents to enable a connection to environment and weather through sound. The reasoning for the project evolves from the narrative of journal entries made during research in an island landscape. It begins with the use of kites as interfaces with the medium of the air. Then, due to adverse conditions, sound bows are built from local materials and used as ‘connecting devices’ to the wind. After initial trials with phone recordings of the noises emitted by the bows, a method of recording and experiencing sound by hand-drawing is developed which does not rely on digital machines. The project aims to analyse the equation between movement and form through drawing. Translating sound into another medium such as drawing can only be rendered as an equivalence, but the experience of attempting to do this through hand-drawing enables me to know how it feels to be the wind.

This exegetical analysis of performance drawing highlights its character as an interdisciplinary process. Specifically, I demonstrate that the interrelation of drawing and performance, that occurs in the active, live-audience drawing processes, is a unique interdisciplinary exchange. This analysis utilizes the concept of ‘intra-action’, as defined by Karen Barad, to reveal the multidirectional and emergent processes of the interdisciplinary exchange exhibited through drawing as performance. Furthermore, this interdisciplinary exchange is likened to a Möbius loop. Exploring ‘intra-action’ and the Möbius loop analogy, I examine the interdisciplinary drawing process through the cooperative performance drawing work initiated by myself, Kellie O’Dempsey (Australia) and Jennifer Wroblewski (United States): Resistance Movement (2017–18). This work exemplifies the interdisciplinary process of performance drawing as the initiator for creative exchange. To examine this proposition, I isolate the components of drawing, performance and the spatio-temporal, and analyse how these components operate through Resistance Movement. While Barad’s theory of intra-action relates to the entanglement of matter in the universe, I use the theory to explore the entangled aspects of performance drawing that create a single, unified experience for both artists and viewers. The three elements – drawing, performance and the spatio-temporal – combine, resulting in intra-action. Thus, creating a unique, interdisciplinary event.

On 21 February 2021 at 9.00 p.m., the performance Three Turns was featured as part of a curated series of works in The Performance Arcade (PA2021), a festival that brought together live art, music and performance on Wellington’s Waterfront. In a shipping container transformed into a temporary stage, three artists: a drawer, a dancer and a musician, celebrated the immediacy of their mediums. In an hour-long performance, a dialogue across disciplines was formed, a dialogue that evolved intuitively. Over three turns, each artist took the lead, with a note, a mark and a gesture offered up as provocation – forms, actions, colours and chords followed. The sonic surface, the stage and the page merged into a single space in which the artists explored velocity, rhythm and repetition. This encounter created a place where gravity and levity pushed and pulled, space was devoured and patterns emerged, accumulated and dissipated. The collaborative performance of Three Turns allowed three artists to form a dialogue across disciplines and ask: what new knowledge can emerge from a conversation between drawing, dance and music? This report, written in the first person from the drawer’s perspective, with contributions from The Dancer/Sacha Copland and The Musician/Simon Eastwood, reflects upon the event and posits that whilst on an individual level the performance produced new drawings, new sounds and new movements that individually had value, it was the relation between the three artists and their mediums, that emerged to be the most significant aspect of the work.

Review of: Observational Drawing for Students with Dyslexia, Qona Rankin and Howard Riley (2021)

London and Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 93 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78775-142-2, p/bk, £16.99