Drawing as Diffractive Research : Mind/Hand/Media/Wayfaring, all in the thick of material existence.

Diffractive Research.

Tim Ingold's concept of "diffractive research" emphasizes a dynamic and iterative approach to inquiry, where researchers move between different lenses and perspectives, exploring the interplay between diverse elements. This method, rather than seeking a definitive conclusion, aims to enrich understanding by embracing the "emergent difference" and "variation in commoning" found within the research object. 

Elaboration:

"Diffractive" as a Metaphor:

Ingold's use of "diffraction" draws an analogy to the physical process of light being bent and spread when it encounters an obstacle. This process reveals the nature of the obstacle and the light itself, highlighting the complexity of their interaction. 

Iterative and Relational:

Diffractive research is not a one-time process but a continuous engagement with the research subject, moving between different perspectives and interpretations. This iterative approach emphasizes the relational nature of knowledge, recognizing that understanding emerges from the interplay between the researcher and the object of study. 

Embracing "Emergent Difference" and "Variation in Commoning":

Instead of seeking to define or reduce difference, diffractive research celebrates the "emergent difference" that arises from the interactions between diverse elements. It also emphasizes "variation in commoning," recognizing that individuals and things can contribute to a shared understanding even when they have nothing in common. 

"Wayfaring" as a Method:

Ingold's concept of "wayfaring" (a way of traversing the world, constantly engaging with its details) is closely linked to diffractive research. Wayfaring involves actively engaging with the world, paying attention to the details and nuances that emerge along the way. 

Examples in Practice:

This approach can be seen in research that explores:

Materiality and Agency: How materials shape human action and how humans, in turn, reshape materials. 

Knowledge and Memory: How knowledge is not simply transmitted but actively generated and shaped through experience and interaction. 

Social and Cultural Practices: How social and cultural practices are constantly being re-interpreted and re-created through interaction. 

Beyond Objectivity:

Diffractive research challenges traditional notions of objectivity by embracing the inherent subjectivity of research. It recognizes that knowledge is always produced within specific contexts and through particular relations. 

In essence, Tim Ingold's concept of diffractive research offers a powerful framework for understanding how knowledge is generated and how we can engage with the world in a more dynamic and nuanced way. 

AI Overview/Google

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The Body of Drawing/Butades.

Thinking Matter : Cosmologies/Constellations/Assemblages/Apparatuses. 

Matter (as interlacing interplay that is dynamic and mutually defining) has its own nature.

In the thick of material existence.

Merleau-Ponty.

On The Hospitality/Intertwining of Lines

Making/Moving Matter/Theoretical Objects for Spatial Practises.

In and Out of Material/Matter/Matters of Concern/Sculpture

Tony Cragg.

Situated Practices/Architectures of Care/Concern.

Oren Lieberman.

The searching line proposes/launches visual observations/haptic responses, and conversely what is seen determines how the next line is to continue in a perpetual and recursive interaction that unfolds in ongoing time. 

Relationscapes of/with/for Drawing.

What is drawing?

What is the nature of the drawn line?

Un-Learning Drawing.

The drawn line is raw, on permanent view of its emergence into the world, an open zone that operates in real time. Corrections to the line, challenge perceptions and build intimate relationscapes with the mind, body, media and surface.

'In drawing' we are perceiving the evolving process of thought and perception.

Avis Newman.

Praesentia, being present, a presence that is close at hand to the present moment or time.

The phenomena and its nowness/nearness in the light of day. 

Drawing is driven from the outside.

The agent/agency of drawing admits that the process leads, the mind follows.

First the material signifier, marks on paper, then afterwards the signified, the depicted scene and its nominal referent. For Cozens the random application of splashes and patches of ink would at first appear a chaos, yet with a little skill, out of that chaos forms could be encouraged to appear. Blots might become clouds or the silhouette of hills. For Bryson, Cozens 'anti method' clarifies what the official ideology of drawing-as-transparency habitually mystifies. That the relation between subject matter and line is not at all a question of before or after.

Though far from being a work of philosophy Cozen's method/manual anticipates the broad outlines of Merleau-Ponty's description of the intending consciousness as always already in the world, in the thick of material existence.

Drawing the line involves an interlacing of outside and inside, a permanent cross-over between interior (the artist's mind, sensations,sensibilities) and exterior (paper, pigment,stylus).

A Walk For Walk's Sake.

Norman Bryson.

Studio Silences of  Space-Time Phenomena/Phenomenology.

Existential becomings in the thick of our material existence.

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Primal Scene of Drawing/The Trace of Butades.

Is all about preserving loss/the blankness of paper and a hand that is about to make its first trace on the surface. Drawing enacts the very moments of trepidation when a new image is about to enter the world. 

Drawing is an art of presence and transparency of phenomena unfolding, a fusion between the artist's mind, the artist's hand, and the beholder's gaze.

On Drawing.

The work of observation is necessarily shaped by the line it leaves behind.

The drawn line conditions or models the selections from the field of observation. It launches observation along a particular direction or path.

Sunlight enters into architecture and sensations of bodily presence/perception.

Vessels unfolding through durations of light and dark.

Flesh/Sensation/Paint/Francis Bacon.

An Unconditional Body from Social Objectivity to the Extremes of Subjectivity.

Acts of both presence and transparency.

Mapping Subjectivity/Gathering Matter.

Organism-Person-Environment.

Architectural Body.

Art works and artists, all manifests themselves at the social interaction and reading/rendering of subjectivity.

The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Acts.

Like the drawings themselves, the exhibitions loyalty is to the immediate experience of the individual image rather than to the totalizing logic of art history complete with its grand narratives of social and cultural change. The exhibition reveals the convergence of real time operations (realities) the artist's visual idea in the time of its coming into the world, and the always ongoing work of viewing.

Pathways of difference, of the brush and pencil as they move through their respective spaces.

For The Brush.

Before it can touch the surface of the canvas, the bush has to orient itself according to the four sides of the frame, and then according to the total sum of the marks that have already appeared on the surface of the picture. It has to hover, to hesitate, to sense as though by dowsing where a channel in space may now open up, a groove in the total surface that the brush may now enter.

For The Pencil.

In drawing the presence of the 'reserve' frees the pencil from this complex calculus of the totality, reducing the scope to an area that can be taken in at once. A local area, that lies where the hand is now in praesentia. For Bryson this introduces the possibility that the drawn line, maybe closer to the immediacy of the artist's thought and perception than the line made on canvas. 

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Drawing The Body/Figure Event : The Luminescence Of Space.

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Drawing, depicting something found through the process of making visible.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

The Luminescence Of Space.

An Archaeological Inquiry Into Drawing.

Correspondences/Reclaiming the drawings.

The Affect and Memory of Drawing.

To interrogate ways of seeing/looking, John Berger. 

The world of the creative practitioner promotes conditions, gestures and responses that articulate social, political and other theoretical findings which are all 'present' at the inception of the work.

Colin Renfrew.

The Myth of Butades.

Figure/Ground Relationships.

Theoretical Thought : Diagram and map.

Neo-Sumerian temple plan on clay tablet from c. 2100BC.

The drawing/work may take the form of the result of an act or action carried out at a specific time but which itself does not persist.

Art can be the expression in the material world of a concept, or the transformation into one material form of a structure that exists in another.

Drawing/Substance/Memory/Display.

The artist's creative act, is of a self amongst others.

Material/Thinking Matter.

Drawings mediated by the distance of memory.

Art Works, subtle embodiments, visual markers both spatial and sociological.

Life/Drawing/Figuring It Out.

The Luminescent Dematerialization Of The Subject.

Expressions Of Both Figuration And Abstraction.

Phenomenological approaches to Drawing/Looking/Others.

Demarcation/drawing boundaries/wayfaring/paths on the land, re The Making of Space.

Walking/Movement is quiet literally what made us human.

The walk is a 'mark' laid upon thousands of other layers of human and geographical history on the surface of the land. Bipedalism is the precursor to the evolution of a large brain, creative intelligence and language.

Richard Long/Colin Renfrew.

Charles Mausson.

Walking Man, No. 3. 1990.

Oil, crayon, 203.0 x 137.0 cm.

Starting from a subject or a simple figurative form, Charles Maussion sets of like an explorer, in search of unexplored lands, looking for something spiritual. It is through walking/drawing/thinking that one can remain human even while seeking out, and without even knowing it, finding it, or finding yourself in lands which are thousands of light years from our society, whilst nevertheless being very close to it. A calm, a loudness, that is extreme, beautiful.

Robert Combas. 1993.

 

The simple presence of a figure is sufficient to suggest the unity of the individual in a universe which is patiently observed and precisely apprehended. There is a complete absence of any compositional device suggested within the canvas, all that emanates is a climate of strangeness, serenity and disquiet. 

Sophie Dupont. 1995.

The blurring of the conventional distinction between the figure and the ground, so as to capture an atmospheric effect, which sought to approximate the murkiness of visual perception.

The legibility of the photographic image was denied by the process of blurring the image.

Paintings, abstract identities of surface and material, introducing content via a dematerialization, so as to engage in a process of pure vision, pure silence, reincarnated, vibrant, alive.

William Jeffett. 1995. 

Drawing on the consciousness and corporeality of others, of figural dissolution of the traditional figure/ground relationships, and fragmentation/blurring of the human form. The contemporary body and its environments are experientially brought into abstracted absences, corporeal traces of visual matter, movement and dissolving/reappearing forms.

Figural Expressions.

Figural dissolution of a nude descending a staircase, Marcel Duchamp.

Stop-motion photography of the human body in motion, Etienne Marey.

Figural, paintings/drawings not as representations of tangible subjects, but as registers of a more abstract range of emotions, as a series of studies, always incomplete and never finished, a work in progress. The nude/ the human body has become mediated by the mechanical effects of photography and the distance/blindness of memory.

Notations.

Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process.

Fred Sandback.

The Drawing Room.

The Secret Theory of Drawing.

Jim Dine.

Figure Drawings, 1975-79.

The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn.

John Eldenfield.

Manuel Neri.

Drawings/Relief Sculptures.

Naked To Nude.

Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.

Georg Eisler.

Indexical Trace/Drawing : Anthropocentrism/Hospitality.

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Figurative Anthropocentrism in the Visual Arts/Humanities.

Organism-Person-Environment

Architectural Body.

A figure in congress with its environment.

Attunement is a living dynamic relation with another being, it doesn't stop.

De-constructivist Drawings.

Causal Matter Remains.

Reclaiming the papers reserve, its infinite space, through the reclamation of mark making.

Drawing/Veering towards things.

All lines as vectors of movement, situated to have immediate phenomenal values.

Seeking out, a line that searches for a corporeal congress.

Immediate primal territories of making/tuning differences.

Marks of attunement and adaption that we can own and explore.

Indexical Trace/Butades, definitive space/body of a boundary of sensation. 

Bodily inclusion, a drawing hidden yet revealing its presence intimately to the papers total surface. 

A lines movement, its attunement/demarcation to the body, of the body, creates the flow of sensation, simultaneous lines make explicit the absence of the matter into form.  

On the manner of attunement, since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy. Nor is this attunement a 'merely' aesthetic approach to a basically blank extensional substance. Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing. 

In Art As In Life.

What would it look like if we allowed more and more things to have some kind of power over us?

There is an excessive intensity to the energy of things that can't be contained efficiently. This can produce a type of restricted economy, that is an economy in which the dominant theme is efficiency.

Living in a society based on principles of restriction and efficiency, a modern life that is tight and restrictive and full of all kinds of police and policing, of policing pleasure, of keeping lifeforms alive. In the end any style of efficiency is going to be stifling and uncreative, not allowing for malfunctions and accidents.

Art is a place where we get to see what it means to be human or whatever, which is why what I do is called humanities, which contains a lot of different temporal formats, realising this is what ecological awareness is all about. It's the equivalent to acknowledging in a deep way, the existence of things that aren't you with whom you coexist. Once you've done that you can't un-acknowledge it. There's no going back.

All Art Is Ecological/Tunings. Timothy Morton.

Painting adds perspectives of emotions through colour.

An idea for a painting is a way of seeing inquiry/nurturing it/gathering an idea for exploration between interior-exterior. 

 

Acts of Drawing/Derrida : Becomings through immaterial, memory and blindness.

JACQUES DERRIDA THE SCEPTICISM OF DRAWING:

“perception belongs to recollection.” Butades daughter’s act is in blindness, as if she was drawing a declaration of love.

Jacques Derrida in 1993 wrote an extensive text to accompany an exhibition of paintings from the Louvre. This text titled Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins contains within it some particular references to “Pliny’s Origins of Painting." Together with the aid of illustrations of paintings on this theme, he examines and interrogates their philosophical and historical qualities.

Derrida makes particular mention and emphasis of the “state of blindness” in his analysis of the Butades myth. In particular the notion of  “scepticism” which is at the very heart of drawing. This notion of the “difference between believing and seeing”1, and what he remarks as “believing one sees and seeing between” evokes the emergence of a “glimpse” caught in a state in which “doubt ever becomes a system“2. There is a moment of delay between the gaze with its vigilance and attention, and what one reflects upon seeing. These actions will conspire to create the moment of conclusion. So by keeping the thing in sight it is being constantly examined but not reflected on, until the point when the gaze is averted to the drawing .It is a this instant, withdrawn from the sight of the object, that a “blindness” forces the recollection (the moment of conclusion to emerge) to which the drawn mark is visual evidence of that moment Derrida makes the observation that representations substitute memory for perception and that blindness is a constant withdrawal into memory. Derrida is of the view that drawings, paintings are “representations drawn most often from an exemplary narrative." This myth of Butades with its “exemplary narrative” relates directly to the absence or invisibility of (being in) the drawing process whilst in the presence of the object, that the very act of drawing withdrawals and blinds its participant. Butades daughter is “blinded” in the acts of both love and the act of drawing. Through these conditions it can be seen that Butades daughter is blind to the vision of her lover and in drawing around his projection she is forced to recollect and reflect to produce a conclusion of that action by the simple gesture and act of an inscription drawn aided by a flickering silhouette.

Derrida uses the example of the painting by J. B. Suvee “Butades or the Origin of Drawing 1791” or as it is referred in English as “The Daughter of Butades Drawing the Shadow of Her Lover ” to illustrate that it was “as if one drew only on the condition of not seeing.” The drawing in effect becomes a “declaration of love destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other.”3 Derrida comments that the origin of drawing may have become born from the desire to create some sort of surrogate mark which originates “from seeing the other withdrawn from sight.“4 The important observation Derrida continues to make is that the daughter in “following the traits of a shadow or a silhouette” who is in effect drawing on a blindness which will through recollection, initiates a sense with which she is in effect “already loves in nostalgia.”5

Derrida dwells on the very nature of drawing moving away from “the origin of drawing” to “the thought of drawing” he comments that the thought of a drawing has a “certain pensive pose, a memory of the trait that speculates, as in a dream, about its own possibility.”6 It is as if the potency of drawings is a projected development that occurs as Derrida states “on the brink of blindness.” This notion of the “trait” (a feature to a line, stroke, or mark) a visible presence that accompanies the lines odyssey, a sense of presence that can witness something of the invisible in the visible is touched upon. ’’Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible is cited by Derrida as having already made “Indications” in this respect Derrida footnote from The Visible and the Invisible seems to sum up something of the invisibility and presence of the trait acting on a drawing. This extract taken from the “working notes” section of the book it reads” One has to understand that it is visibility itself that involves a non visibility.”7

Distilled from the salient points of Derrida’s extensive interrogation Memoirs of the Blind seems to acknowledge the fact that “whether Butades daughter follows the tracts of a shadow or a silhouette or even if she draws on the surface of a wall or in a veil.”8 the resultant inscription in any event “inaugurates an act of blindness.” Derrida’s revelation is that “perception belongs to recollection.” Butades daughter’s act is in blindness, as if she was drawing a declaration of love that simultaneously that also contains her anticipation of a loss, and as a result, a nostalgia that is reflected upon before it is actually perceived.

1  . Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, The Self Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1993),page 1.

2  .Ibid., page 1.

3  .Ibid., page 49.

4  .Ibid., page 49.

5  .Ibid., page 51.

6  .Ibid., page 3.

7   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968),257.

8   Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, page 51.

Metonymy : The Body Of Drawing/On Precarious Enclosures/Ceramics/Wanting Shelter.

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Zola Jesus : Arkhon

Metonymy as often treated as a subtype of metaphor by cognitive linguistics has a different working mechanism. Metaphor is based on perceived similarity between things, while metonymy on the relationship within things.

The trace and trait of mark making is a durational gesture on the way to becoming an line/outline/contour.

Mark-Making 'names' something absolutely inhuman, the shadow and the strain and the loss of any criterion to distinguish between the intended and the unintended and between human indications and marks produced by natural processes.

Line, takes marks, traces out of duration into forms set in eternity.

Seeing the relation between the daughter's and the father's image making as that between metonymy based on contiguity, and metaphor based on similarity, each produces in a different way a defective image. The portrait image based on resemblance fails to unite the inner essence of the subject, just as a shadow traces only the contours of the body.

In Drawing the problem is to 'slow' the consideration of the mark, so that it does not move too quickly toward line-contour-figuration or image. But to allow it to hesitate on the edge.

Images In Mind.

Pliny's Story of the Origin of Drawing.

Deborah Tarn Steiner.

Contemporary Fine Art Practices.

The Lines of Thinking about Drawing.

Michael Newman.

Drawing-as markingtime-memory-matter in the work of Avis Newman.

Working/Thinking with-Imprint-Index-Trace-Mark-Photograph-

Inside The Visible.

Catherine De Zegher. 1996

The image exists after the object.

First we see, then we imagine.

Maurice Blanchot.

To the artist, the creation of objects is a process of sequencing their work processes, rather than the completion of work.

Eva Hesse's practice offered Christina Iglesias a model for a process-based way of working, rooted in a deliberately limited range of materials.

Eva Hesse, Lucy Lippard.

On Making Skins-Shells.

Metonymy.

The sculptural spaces Christina Iglesias constructs are kinds of dream-catchers. They are there to transport our imagination. We again see how the light in the text is filtered and refracted on its journey through different materials, in a way that is very similar to the experience afforded by Iglesias's sculpture, in that sense, she creates spaces that are materialized poetry. 

Ceramics as Performative/Speculative/Experimental and Discursive.

Adventures Of The Fire, into a process of experimentation that is expressed as an incompleteness through forming an incomplete part of a bowl, and in doing this it presents a new form as a gate. Experimentation is always towards the new and as such it presents a basic direction about creation. As a venture, a process of experimentation, that is all about the new, notwithstanding if it is successful or unsuccessful.

When seen separately as individual pieces, these works with their widely varied experimentation on forms and new techniques/technologies are perceived as ordinary ceramics and craftwork. But when they are assembled together according to a different method of display, they collectively become an installation and a formative artwork/network. One module constitutes one artwork and each artwork creates one space, then it is no longer necessary to divide ceramics into genres of traditional ceramics and contemporary ceramics, or ceramics as expression and ceramics for use. 

The Space Of Fire-Charcoal, includes ceramics that impart a feeling of charcoal or have colour that contrasts with charcoal.

The Space Of Earth-Clay, presents contemporary formative works in front of a curving wall of layered fragments of bisque-fired pots, earthenware, stoneware, white porcelain, bancheong and celadon. Stories about the flow of time and plasticity of clay are told here.

On Making and Taking Up Stories.

On Feelings and Correspondences.

Ceramic Space and Life.

We humans occupy space as big as our physical bodies and expansion of space occupied by individuals give rise to the concept of collective space. A space enables its members to communicate with each other and produces unique culture and creates communication within itself. If such meaning of space is expanded, each and every object takes space as its volume.

Space contains objects, and people experience cultural communication within the space.

Every space that is occupied by each work presented at this exhibition feels different depending on the shape-colour-volume-texture and meaning of the work, not to mention the physical dimensions of the space in which the individual work is placed.

An individual work has meaning by itself, regardless of where and how it is juxtaposed in the space and how viewers perceive it. Such existence and meaning give rise to art of a new concept within a space. An installation itself becomes an exhibition, one space exists as one single artwork.

Ceramic Gate, while being one single piece of art, also shows how architecture is directly integrated into ceramics, this installation was designed to be in harmony with the existing gallery building, while also presenting ceramics as a core formative element. This installation was a joint work of participating artists in Ceramic Space and Life, and it is considered as suggesting a model (methodology) for the combination and integration of architecture and ceramics.

Eight spaces to present an architectural concept, displaying works grouped into natural elements of People-Water-Fire-Clay-Metal-Light-Wood.

Each of the eight sections of the exhibition sheds light on the fundamental nature and artistic values of ceramics, by displaying ceramics of different types, traditional and contemporary, and ceramics as expression, and ceramics for use together, and at the same time new meaning is created as each individual work communicates with the space in which it is placed. 

The space, illuminates ceramics into spatial harmonies of Space Art and Ceramic Art, gathered here these 150 works will suggest the future direction of ceramics by showing marks and traces of the past.

Ceramic-Object. 

Hong-won Lee, Curator

On Precarious Enclosures/Wanting Shelter.

No ideas haunt us as much as those of stable matter and fixed place.

An intense attentiveness is born of the perpetual sense of being an outsider and the continual readjustment in viewpoint that it requires.

Cristina Iglesias.

Alone or Aligned?

An Aesthetic Identity.

Lynne Cooke.

1993 was a pivotal year for Cristina Iglesias, for the first time her work was convincingly contextualized in relation to her peers and mentors. That same year she entered into an agreement with Artscape Nordland to create a site-specific sculpture in a remote area of Northern Norway.

In Sintitulo untitled ( Laurel Leaves) 1993-94, she explored a way of staging spatial relations rooted in Modernist architectural histories that has since remained the core of her aesthetic.

Barbara Stafford situated Iglesias's work in a cultural history in which places of shelter and refuge serve a fundamental role in that they address psychic as well as functional needs. Referencing both organic and man-made structures from archaic times onward, Stafford argued that Iglesias's works evoke both the age-old escapist dream of being hedged from life and the desire still urgent today for a terrestrial paradise wanting shelter. 

For Stafford, Iglesias's precarious enclosures at once vulnerable and somehow out of place, put an intolerable pressure on the meaning of mental security. Eloquently situating her art in relation to architectural typologies and histories, Stafford establishes the terms in which Iglesias's practice would be parsed henceforth.

The Daughter of Butades.

Drawing traces is the act of differentiation of figure and ground (the reserve).

Butades's daughter and her many marks around the shadow, do not yet form the unified-idealizing contour, nor yet the figure against the ground.

Architectural and Environmental Ceramics.

Perforated Screens.

Gate-Wall-Pavilion-Object

Ceramic Houses

Nader Khalili. 1990

Architectural Ceramics for the Studio Potter.

Peter King. 1999

Drawing Zones/Studios/Sites of Inquiry/Concern.

 

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Architectural Body.

Thresholds.

Drawing.

Confronting Bodies.

Drawing : The Indexical/To Work Inside Feeling.

Inscripting Self : The Daughter of Butades.

Kairos : The movement and its moment.

Being Alive.

Tim Ingold.

There is no stage at which humankind does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving tracers that are both symbolic and practical.

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

Drawing on the Movements of Desire and Attention.

Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, Bachelard.

The drawing itself is desperate to keep hold of an absence, it all began with a silhouette of a shadow on the wall. In the myth of Butades, the drawing is not generated by 'loss' itself but the her anticipation of loss captured in the moment of turning away, and act that unites blindness to memory.

Derrida.

Drawing is a gaze turned inward into the task at hand, it draws on the inevitable, displacement and absence of the 'thing' and its relation, its otherness.

The 'mark' and its imaginary space are encountered as a fact of existence. In drawing it is this evidence of beingness that is invested in the work, 'drawing itself' becomes a coming-into-being into the presentness of language of the image.

The image corresponds to its own unfolding pulsion, to an obsession, to a desire to expand its own flux beyond the assigned body. Material keeps desire on the inclined plane of appearances surrounding it with its gravity, the drawing materializes a surface in which desire condenses itself and infiltrates inside the oppressive operative grids/apparatuses of language.

Drawing on the holding apart instances, moments and intervals between consciousness and self consciousness. The early formative drawings of children are not guided by a visual exploration of space, but by the hand as an exploration of movement, it is only later that drawing is guided by the eye. In children graphic expression is blind, disconnected from perception, rather it is led by muscular, tonic and plastic sensations.

The 'Stage of Drawing' is at attempt to discuss what Avis Newman believes to be a crisis in art as to how an artist deals in a non-literal way with a sense of humanity, which for her is part of the essence of the artistic project. Her selection from the Tate Collection is based on a definition of drawing not as expression, but as an act of consciousness, the manifestation of which is culture, and by extension the social and political realm. In this exhibition, drawing tends and relates to the indexical as the effect of a corporealized process. In fact the aim is partly to divest drawing of the artist, so one can see this act of consciousness.

According to Newman, this indexical definition of drawing is opposed to a materialistic one, which would be about investment/authorship in the material world and would concern itself indirectly with sociological art, for Newman on the contrary we are trying to locate the area where meaning has no economy and does not have to justify itself by purpose.

Drawing even in the most fragmented of forms, there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me but also the activity of sensation.

Avis Newman.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through which without colliding would provide/produce the establishment of places, localities made special for one reason or another.

In looking at drawing, one may see not the thing itself but its possibility, its suggestion and its uncertainty as to what stage it is in its becoming.

What ever the intent, the drawing is always the artist's response to whatever, draws-the-artist's attention. To what Cezanne called the 'little sensations' and for the artist it is a question of how to rescue sensation from its subordination by representation.

Drawing as experience and experimentation, demands that the artist be susceptible to and capable of taking advantage of the uncoupling of everyday space-time and with it the expansion of the field of consciousness, to engage in what Klee once described as 'polyphonic attention.'

In the end drawing is rooted in the dematerialized space of the image, indexical or imaginative, privileging more the world of shadows than the world of appearances. The drawing surface is confirming the possibility and use of a language that albeit in a fragile way, leaves open an interstitial passage through which the imaginary may realize itself as an image.

Drawing manifests the very nature of a feeling-thinking-consciousness-of-the-body.

Drawing makes visible the synthesis, its interval and split between subject and object, between the desiring subject and the subject of language.

To draw is to protect the intensity of thought-feeling, and as such the drawing is always a formulation or elaboration of the thought itself at the very moment/instant in which it translates itself, makes itself 'visible' as an image.

The material of art, any material is that which imprisons and makes definitive desire. It is the way the material is manifested in revealing what defines the split between the imaginary and the subject. Drawing becomes the apparatus, the mechanism that tends to give order to the only dimension in which desire moves, space and time.

Drawing seeks always to reveal the gesture of the artist through the space of the surface, to capture the moment that precedes the birth of the sign. The external space becomes a specular surface, a field that captures and organizes the image. The image always corresponds/is a correspondence to a pulsion of desire, a vector that puts it in communion with tactile and visual sensations.

Drawing makes reversible the movement of desire/attention suspending it in a place understood as a place of projections and reversibility. For John Berger, the drawing shows the paths taken.

Drawing/Spatial Practice.

UCA Canterbury.

Artist Statement. 2009

Zones/Studios/Sites of Inquiry/Concern.

Within my practice drawing is used to form sites which contain visual information, evidence of temporal activities and traces of actual objects. These territories within other territories create flows formed from their permeable boundaries gathered from material, relations and differences. My drawings are about and are inside this temporality of site.

Thresholds.

Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione.

Antonello da Messina.

St. Jerome in His Study, 1474-75.

National Gallery, London.

The only figurative work in the world in which entering and crossing coincide in a unique concept of physical space, defining the specificity of the architecture by transforming the limits of solid materials into the construction of a liminal space which can be crossed by passing through thresholds.

The concept of architecture is the crossing of a space that becomes physically visible when one enters the space itself. In Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa, architecture thus becomes an art form which helps us to overcome the absence of life by expanding the horizon of our minds and hearts, freeing us from our bodies, giving dignity to the void left by the loss of living presences and emotional ties.

The spatial dimension of this small building is a metaphor for the mental workings of meditation. The pavilion is the place where we can enter the mind's empty space, where we can get away from all our passing concerns.

Small cylinders of different heights and sizes, barely visible below the surface of the water. A small, inaccessible maze. A maze through the water, a maze through time, a maze of symbols and enigmas. Here, as in the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges, the maze is an allegory for the complexity of the world, which cannot be understood merely through reason. The maze itself was created to confuse those who rely on reason alone. Its winding paths lead us to a reality that lies far beyond that existential normality which hides deeper complications.

In 'The Garden of Forking Paths' Borges describes the possible outcomes of an event, each of which leads to a further multiplication of consequences, in a continuous 'branching off' of potential futures.

The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

Catherine de Zegher.

Architectural Body.

Arie Graafland, Michael Speaks.

Drawings and Ceramic Models.

Making-Living-Environs

Hannsjorg Voth 1973-2003.

City of Orion.

Boat of Stone.

Hassi Romi.

The origins of painting and the scepticism of drawing : Architectural surface for a place of study/studio

Painting as an exploratory layered drawing for an architectural surface in a library

 a shadow or an eidolen, an image without substance

Drawing Traces : Metaphysics/Atmospheric Cosmogonies

THE MYTH:

PLINY THE ELDER : NATURAL HISTORY,translation H. Rackham 1952. BOOK 35

Origins of Painting ( XXXV,5).

The question as to the origin of the art of painting is uncertain and it does not belong to the plan of this work. The Egyptians declare that it was invented among themselves six thousand years ago before it passed over into Greece-which is clearly an idle assertion. As to the Greeks, some of them say it was discovered at Sicyon, others in Corinth, but all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man s shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done in this way, but the second stage when a more elaborate method had been invented was done in a single colour and called monochrome, a method still in use at the present day.

Plastic art. Early stages. Butades and others. (XXXV ,43 ).

Enough and more has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man ; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery ; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by Mummius.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES: BOOKS:

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (Boston :Beacon Press, 1964). 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Reading: Vintage,2000).

Roland Barthes, Mythologies ( Reading: Vintage,2000).

Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 2006).

Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light (New Jersey: Princetown University Press, 1997). 

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992). 

Tony Cragg, In And Out of Material {Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications,2006). 

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1994).

Ernst Gombrich, Shadows, The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art (London: National Gallery Publications, 1995).

Antony Gormley, Drawings (London: The British Museum Press, 2002).

Tania Kovats, The Drawing Book (London: Black Dog Publishing,2007). 

Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter (Peterborough: Broadview Press,2003). 

Pliny, Natural History Books 33-35 trans H. Rackham, (London: Harvard University Press,2003). 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

Victor 1. Stoichita, A Short History of The Shadow ( London: Reaktion, 1997). 

Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). 

Rose Temkin, Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).

Tracey Warr, The Artists Body ( London: Phaidon Press,2000).

OUTPOST Studio/Cyanotype Process Painting

EXHIBITION CATALOGUES:

Anthony Bond, Body (New South Wales: The Art Gallery of NewSouthWales,1997). 

Michael Craig-Martin, Drawing the Line(London South Bank Centre, 1995).

Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1993).

Avis Newman, The Stage of Drawing, Gesture and Act (London: The Tate Drawing Centre, 2003 ).

Giuseppe Penone, The Eroded Steps (Halifax. Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, 1989).

 

The South Bank Centre, The Body of Drawing, Drawings by Sculptors (London: The South Bank Centre, 1993).

Michaela Unterdorfer, In Search of The Perfect Lover (Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle,2003).

JACQUES DERRIDA THE SCEPTICISM OF DRAWING:

Jacques Derrida in 1993 wrote an extensive text to accompany an exhibition of paintings from the Louvre. This text titled Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins contains within it some particular references to “Pliny’s Origins of Painting." Together with the aid of illustrations of paintings on this theme, he examines and interrogates their philosophical and historical qualities.

Derrida makes particular mention and emphasis of the “state of blindness” in his analysis of the Butades myth. In particular the notion of  “scepticism” which is at the very heart of drawing. This notion of the “difference between believing and seeing”1, and what he remarks as “believing one sees and seeing between” evokes the emergence of a “glimpse” caught in a state in which “doubt ever becomes a system“2. There is a moment of delay between the gaze with its vigilance and attention, and what one reflects upon seeing. These actions will conspire to create the moment of conclusion. So by keeping the thing in sight it is being constantly examined but not reflected on, until the point when the gaze is averted to the drawing .It is a this instant, withdrawn from the sight of the object, that a “blindness” forces the recollection (the moment of conclusion to emerge) to which the drawn mark is visual evidence of that moment Derrida makes the observation that representations substitute memory for perception and that blindness is a constant withdrawal into memory. Derrida is of the view that drawings, paintings are “representations drawn most often from an exemplary narrative." This myth of Butades with its “exemplary narrative” relates directly to the absence or invisibility of (being in) the drawing process whilst in the presence of the object, that the very act of drawing withdrawals and blinds its participant. Butades daughter is “blinded” in the acts of both love and the act of drawing. Through these conditions it can be seen that Butades daughter is blind to the vision of her lover and in drawing around his projection she is forced to recollect and reflect to produce a conclusion of that action by the simple gesture and act of an inscription drawn aided by a flickering silhouette.

Derrida uses the example of the painting by J. B. Suvee “Butades or the Origin of Drawing 1791” or as it is referred in English as “The Daughter of Butades Drawing the Shadow of Her Lover ” to illustrate that it was “as if one drew only on the condition of not seeing.” The drawing in effect becomes a “declaration of love destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other.”3 Derrida comments that the origin of drawing may have become born from the desire to create some sort of surrogate mark which originates “from seeing the other withdrawn from sight.“4 The important observation Derrida continues to make is that the daughter in “following the traits of a shadow or a silhouette” who is in effect drawing on a blindness which will through recollection, initiates a sense with which she is in effect “already loves in nostalgia.”5

Derrida dwells on the very nature of drawing moving away from “the origin of drawing” to “the thought of drawing” he comments that the thought of a drawing has a “certain pensive pose, a memory of the trait that speculates, as in a dream, about its own possibility.”6 It is as if the potency of drawings is a projected development that occurs as Derrida states “on the brink of blindness.” This notion of the “trait” (a feature to a line, stroke, or mark) a visible presence that accompanies the lines odyssey, a sense of presence that can witness something of the invisible in the visible is touched upon. ’’Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible is cited by Derrida as having already made “Indications” in this respect Derrida footnote from The Visible and the Invisible seems to sum up something of the invisibility and presence of the trait acting on a drawing. This extract taken from the “working notes” section of the book it reads” One has to understand that it is visibility itself that involves a non visibility.”7

Distilled from the salient points of Derrida’s extensive interrogation Memoirs of the Blind seems to acknowledge the fact that “whether Butades daughter follows the tracts of a shadow or a silhouette or even if she draws on the surface of a wall or in a veil.”8 the resultant inscription in any event “inaugurates an act of blindness.” Derrida’s revelation is that “perception belongs to recollection.” Butades daughter’s act is in blindness, as if she was drawing a declaration of love that simultaneously that also contains her anticipation of a loss, and as a result, a nostalgia that is reflected upon before it is actually perceived.

1  . Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, The Self Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1993),page 1.

2  .Ibid., page 1.

3  .Ibid., page 49.

4  .Ibid., page 49.

5  .Ibid., page 51.

6  .Ibid., page 3.

7   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968),257.

8   Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, page 51.

VICTOR I. STOICHITA PLINY’S MYTH:

V. I. Stoichita in his book “A Short History of the Shadow" has analysed “Pliny’s Butades myth,” he makes the point in his introduction “that it is of unquestionable significance that the birth of Western artistic representation was in the negative,1” and that it emerged as such from the projection of the body marking it’s very presence by a projection, a shadow or an eidolen, an image without substance. Butades daughter therefore attempts to capture this intangible immaterial, the double of the one through whom she anticipates her impending loss.

Stoichita has noted that “Pliny” returns to the myth twice, first to discus the origins of painting and then further on to the production of sculpture. Stoichita elaborates further that Pliny claims that “the Greeks discovered painting, not by looking at Egyptian works of art but by observing the human shadow.” Pliny quotes” but all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man’s shadow. “Stoichita connects Pliny correspondence as being a “three part theory” in which he Pliny uses early Greek painting, Egyptian painting, and the shadow. 

Stoichita makes the connection that “Plinys approach can be placed at the crossroads of history and artistic mythology.2” Pliny uses a fable as a myth of origin to interpret the historical existence of early Egyptian painting The evolution of painting from this “early shadow stage” is then replaced by the advancement of a mono-chrome painting which was then later replaced by relief and shading now becomes a means of expression not just a support to give a sense of form to an outline.

1  Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion, 1997), page 7.

2  . Ibid., page 14.

The Daughter of Butades : Visual Art Winchester. 2008

My research centred on various situations that owe their inspiration to Pliny’s simple concise statement in his Natural History on the “origins of painting and the plastic arts.” My initial reason for selecting this particular mythical tale is its sense of performance through the simple act of drawing. It records the daughter of Butades and her lover, collaborating to produce an intimate trace of her gesture and his presence. 

This performative action is at the heart of contemporary art practice. In some respects this trace is done with a form of blindness as commented upon by Derrida. This blindness of drawing and the blindness of love seem to stimulate the idea of a myth within a myth, one blind to the other. The notion that she is in the act of drawing in the anticipation of loss; and simultaneously she is sensing a nostalgic moment. This all transpires whilst her lover is still present. 

Andrey Tarkovsky manages to suffuse these values into his work. These “poetics” are derived from the enduring sensibilities of mythical language. They allow things of wonder to attach themselves to the everyday. Italo Calvino’s comment “with myths, one should not be in a hurry,” seems at odds with our culture of speed and its overabundance of events and information. 

But ironically this “supermodemity” with its non-places that induce a sort of solitary individuality might actually grant access to a mythical language centred by the very anonymity of these transitional sites. It is into these non-places that Butades daughter cites her act and gesture of an artist. The residue and vestige of what remains is her commenting actions, not some attempt at pictorial representation.

The inscription or mark which through an authenticity of an artist becomes captured by the place, it becomes marooned, vacated, at a standstill, time passes through somewhat stalled. This trace of authenticity of the contemporary artist becomes an absence marked, a passage and a dimension of possibilities. 

The contemporary artist is already using a language of material residues, and past events from which new languages will evolve.

Myth must be the lightest historical residue there is; perhaps that is why it can survive on the barest of traces.

White Noise

Nocturnes of Silence

Plastic Horizons/Strange Attractors/Affective Abstractions

 Outpost 010722

Intermediaries/Exploratory Realities.

Constructs/Apparatuses.

Elastic Horizons/Schisms

Space-Time Manifolds

Heuristic Devices/Poetic Ideas

Strange Attractors/Drawings/Diagrams

Architectures that embody philosophy, through limited concepts that work with the contingent and the uncertain.

Light has a new prolific dimension today as a means of measurement and communication.

Light that is not seen with the eyes can be felt. 

Light's psychological effects can lead to extremes of feeling with direct repercussions.

The revelations of new spaces, like interwoven languages, dissolve and reappear in light. In magnificent spaces, light changes and appears to describe form. 

An eclipse of white clarity suddenly gives way to a pulse with colour; light is contingent, its shadows intermittent.

In the mist of the metropolis at night, space dissolves before our eyes, only to take shape again within seconds. 

The spatial depth of the urban field cannot be objectified precisely. In its pulse the polarised position of our body and its perceptions are upset.

If we explore spatial depth, then we can consider how objects appear correct or inverted. During our thought-experiments regarding space, especially space beyond the earthbound (Event Horizon, black hole) we accept new spatial levels and by the force of our imaginations, alter the known spatial levels of previous human existence.

Horizon with aurora borealis.

A horizon is not only an optical condition but also a spinning moment in space-time.

In this sense, the earth is not the ground. 

As things continue to float, they spin and accelerate creating subtle centrifugal forces.

We are organic beings.

All of our objective relations begin from the inside out.

We  must form an extended comprehension of space and time at the scale of astronomical events while not losing the perspective of the microscopic.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

Prototyping For Architects, Mark Burry, Jane Burry.

Why it does not have to be in focus, Jackie Higgins.

Studio Painting/Constituent Parts.

Matter and Affect

Presence and Mutability

Affective Abstractions

Robert Ryman

Shifting perceptions into immersions within a sensate world.

Japanese Minimalism

Exploratory Diagrams

Spatial Forms/Horizons 

Building as a body, a battleground of invisible forces. The spine is the central elevator. 

The structure is a tube of concrete covered with insulation and tarred black wood boards.

Knut Hamsun Museum, Hamaroy, Norway.

Works on Paper and Cloth, visible fixings, securely situated to the wall space.

Architectural Panels/Painting Surfaces.

Soundproofing social noise

The solitary artist literally at the edge of his environment, in a state of profound meditation about our place in the wider cosmos.

We are no longer on the outside as an objective, dispassionate observer, but are now part of the journey and perhaps more subtly part of a ceaseless life-giving cycle.

When we are at the beginning of a journey we, like Odysseus, contemplate a character (or concept) that does not yet exist. Absence and loss precede the appearance of an abstract driving force.

Chaos, confusion, and implosion of information bound up in rules, constraints, and limited means precede every architectural challenge. Once the imagined concept takes hold, its correctness is tested in the way it can work in different modes, from program to light, to space and to material.

The journey from the abstract to the concrete is a metamorphosis from a poetic idea with an exploratory diagram, a coherent purpose to form.

Mattering/Metaphor

Dartmoor/Water

Stream of thought, cascades of neural activity in your mind.

Imprints of the natural environment, explorations of matter and light, self and other.

Works that seem caught between this world and evoking a place that is otherworldly.

She works outdoors using the nocturnal landscape as a darkroom.

On The Presentness Of Photography, Craigie Horsfield.

For Horsfield, by separating the act of taking the image from that of printing it, he believes he draws attention to the 'pastness' of the photograph, which is what the picture depicts, its subject and what he calls the 'presentness' which is how the photograph exists through its surface, its matter, and the physical object.

The instant of the moment is also a past reality.

Slow History/Slow Time on the presentness of things and their complicated relationships to time.

Tactile Light/Casting Images.

Pliny/Butades, tracing an outline of a shadow onto a wall.

Christopher Bucklow has devised a process to depict figures composed of myriad pinhole photographs of the sun. He dispenses with the negative by casting images directly into photograms.

She, is rendered not as a shadow but manifested as a radiant, luminous being. 

They flesh themselves in the astral remnants of dilated starlight.

Skin

Surface

Subjectivity 

The composed image is given an apparent physicality, its surface should be constituted by and of  place and time, it should be vulnerable, porous to impressions like skin.

Physical Forms

Landscape

Free Movement

Cone of Vision/Refraction Diagram

Parallax

Elastic Horizons

Science remains essentially mysterious, yet our daily scientific and phenomenal experiences shape our lives; experience sets a new frame from which we interpret what we perceive.