Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Drawing Disobedient Bodies, Oct 2024

Leaky Embodiment Alter-ego Personas (LEAPs) are visions of tragicomic actors with bodies comprising bulbous, mismatched and ever-changing parts. Their portrayal is meant to challenge ideal notions of embodiment, particularly through envisioning an inherent and intensified otherness of the body, where ruptures occur between desire and empirical reality with respect to an ‘owner’s’ body. Conceived first through sketches, one LEAP figure was portrayed further as a 1:1 mixed-media relief. Two narrative voices – notes from the field by the artist and imagined dialogues between the artist and the LEAP – explore the perception of this process. The pairing of the two narratives exposes contradictions between artistic intentionality and effect. Drawing, whether as a trace with a ballpoint pen, scalpel or jigsaw, was a thread through the process of creation, with various effects ranging from delineating to unravelling. Drawing enacted a physical connection between the real and the imaginary, conflating the bodies of the creator and the depicted figure. Yet as the differing perspectives and evolving manifestations of embodiment in the narratives show, the actuality of bodies is not necessarily found in their facticity; how they feel and what they mean remains multivalent and shifting depending on positioning amidst differing subjectivities, circumstances and temporal frames. Drawing the LEAP’s body enabled traversals of dichotomies of subject/object, self/other and alien/familiar, complicating the assumed categories and opening ground for speculation of what a body could be and do.

This paper provides a sociological analysis of the various drawing actions and experiences within two contemporary social movements, namely Occupy Wall Street (2011) in New York and the Gezi Movement (2013) in Istanbul. It introduces those actions as ‘draw-in’s, relating them to historical and contemporary acts of creative resistance such as the sit-in, die-in, bed-in and stand-in. The ‘drawing’, here referred to as ‘draw-in’, embraces an embodied act of disobedience as well, whether to visually illustrate the movement in question, or to criticize the authority, or to reveal the injustice, or to depict the experiences within the social movements. The question is to understand how different temporalities coexist through those experiences and experimentations from the gestural level of drawing performance to the ongoingness of the draw-ins. Despite their differences in terms of form, creative process and consequences, I argue that the draw-in actions are revealed as transformative acts in its both ephemeral and permanent forms. They illustrated and communicated these relatively contradictory temporal forms through the dynamics of form and flow. This article is based on my research on creative performativity and the fieldwork carried out between 2015 and 2022, both in Istanbul and New York.

Based on a personal bonding experience I had with a roof beam during a temporary residency in Brussels, I look into possibilities of bonding as a practice through drawing. Bonding with a roof beam describes a particular process through which I gradually meet the surroundings in tactile proximities. I discuss that this process suggests an interplay between emotive and material aspects of bonding. Evolving through a series of experiments of drawing and three-dimensional studies, this paper presents three sets of works: the drawing of the roof beam reveals a corporeal presence, preparatory bonding and drawing of the preparatory bonding no 1. These works elaborate on this interplay by seeking embodied relations between materials, tools and techniques of drawing with regard to tactile proximities, suggesting embodied spatio-temporalities and in-between spaces. I discuss that each individual work reconfigures the space of the drawing, as well as the experience of drawing, engaging in a discussion on matter, materiality and corporeality. Through the experiments, I argue that this drawing practice offers a liminal space of possibilities within the artefactual works by which a drafter finds a way to approach space by desire for an embodied materiality. In relation, I suggest that the bonding process becomes tactical in a state of transience as it offers ways to relate oneself to a place by desire.

Drawing inspiration from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, this essay explores the conceptual and creative energies that shape its creation. By immersing in the text, it seeks to engage both intellect and hand in the process of being moved by this literary work. Adopting a free-associative approach, the aim is to capture, through drawing notations, the aporetic space of the novel – a dynamic field marked by disruption and loss, yet interspersed with moments of fluidity and connection. A pivotal aesthesis shapes this contemplation: When technical proficiency seems elusive, how does one rediscover kinaesthetic intelligence?

Disobedience, transgression and instinct are all traits of the wayfaring body. Like the art of wave-piloting in Micronesian stick charts (which are drawings of a kind), both made and read in a particular way, which relies on people’s ability to sense the motion of the waves for navigation. The navigator in this instance can be seen as a disobedient body in search of a way of knowing through drawing, by which such knowledge is a process of wayfaring through mediums, ideas and critical reflection. Navigating through the drawing process reveals known and unknown directions, which relies on observation, critical reading and bodily instinct. The process of work harnesses, at least for a moment, the most disobedient component of the body – the breath as air – that operates and draws. Between life and death, the body asserts its capacity to adapt or resist transformations. Such disobedience emanates from eighteenth-century Italian waxworks of dead bodies and their capacity to look as if alive demonstrating an eerie disobedience of a kind. The act of drawing life to the body is further enhanced by the material reversibility of the wax, a unique material of metamorphosis, that it was made with where the inside and the outside of the body become seamlessly connected, as if the inside flesh is still breathing. Here the question that presents itself is if disobedience (of the body) is a transgression of a kind, or a search for other ways of being and knowing through drawing? By being receptive to the body implicated in the process of drawing, we can tune to sensations of the imperceptible matters of air and find out about the disobedient body in troublesome entanglements. This presents a relational threshold that engages with uncertain, precarious and correlative conditions where disobedience is both an act and a wayfaring process of drawing.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, my home–studio became a space for both art and childcare. As an artist parent, unable to work independently when my 4-year-old daughter’s kindergarten closed, I initiated a project with Louise. With the aid of a scanner and digital printer, our drawings were produced through a series of interventions and exchanges, in a co-working relationship that involves not only humans but also the studio floor and a domestic digital printer to create our ongoing project ‘Index of love and care’. I delegated my artistic practice to Louise, asking her to complete and improve my drawings. Childcare was being performed, and my practice as well. The research question explored in this project report is: who, or what, was at work during our sessions of drawing and childcare in the home–studio? Rather than thinking of the home–studio as merely a container for furniture, materials, tools and machines, this project report seeks to introduce a new understanding of how the studio, as a spatial arrangement of things, plays a part in the activities it facilitates and does some of the work involved in art and childcare. In the light of this case study and drawing on the work of Karen Barad and Gilbert Simondon, I will consider the studio as a milieu where relationships between drawing, technology and childcare can be explored. In doing so, the nature of artistic labour and its relationship to reproduction will be questioned anew.

These images and supporting paper presented by Hubbard and Keeley offer new insights relating to the relationship between movement, drawing, textiles and choreography. ‘The Moving Canvas Project’ is a participatory research project with an adult community dance company where the dancers explore the act of drawing and moving simultaneously. This emergent knowledge is underpinned by theoretical frameworks, in drawing performance, costume design and movement improvisation. The paper discusses a series of workshops where the process of creating textile design for costume and choreography for performance occurred concurrently. The authors present a balanced evaluation of the outcomes, sharing several observations regarding behaviour, performance and the overall aesthetic that emerged when dancers were asked to wear plain cream-coloured jumpsuits and draw on them whilst moving. It explores what influence the two disciplines had on each other and how dancers played with autonomy and collectivism as they drew on themselves and one another. The transient nature of movement creates a dissonance with the permanence of the drawing, which is left as a mark on the dancer’s disobedient bodies. It is within this dynamic interplay between movement and mark-making that a performance emerged.