Drawing ultimately corresponds to a mobile field of properties~forces and emergent spatial thresholds

 Outpost Correspondence 270224

Studio 3.16 Russell Moreton

The Minor Gesture : Manning/Artaud / Newman

Within the body of knowledge there is a mind in the flesh, quick as lightning.

Drawing ultimately corresponds to a mobile field of properties.

* The haptic engagement.

* The stage of drawing.

* Gesture and act.

Drawing exists in a state of potentiality. It is the instability of the framed image or object that resists definitive definition. We are not so much looking at the thing itself as at its suggestion—its possibility within a formation that has yet to occur. The drawing remains suspended in becoming, producing an uncertainty, and with it an anxiety, about what stage of language it inhabits.

To look with the eye and touch of an artist is to observe with sustained scrutiny while remaining aware of the social conditions from which forms emerge. The connection between the drawings in the exhibition lies in the value given to gesture as a primordial act of consciousness and to its trace upon the paper.

— Catherine de Zegher, on Avis Newman

Drawing is conceived in the midst of loss and anxiety.

Within the realm of visual representation, drawing functions as an act of tracing absence.

The mark both opens and closes. It is an inscriptive game that is simultaneously motional and emotional, allowing an active participation in, and temporary mastery over, separation anxiety, while also marking the child's movement towards independence.

The earliest drawings are guided less by the visual exploration of space than by an exploration of movement and spatial relations.

Drawing begins in bodily response. Through acts of inscription it attempts to bring forth a visible language. Gestural traces reveal a continuous process of situating being within becoming.

Drawn from the body of knowledge onto the surface of experience.

For me, drawing continually manifests the endless repetition of remaking. As sensation, it occupies the space of anxiety—perhaps even a childhood anxiety.

## Moving Bodies / Spatial Thresholds

Architecture is entered physically, but also imaginatively. We inhabit not only space but its poetics.

### St Jerome in His Study (1474–75)

Antonello da Messina examines earthly limits through the image of St Jerome seated within a carefully constructed study, seemingly dissected to expose its interior. The room becomes both a place for thought and an architecture of the mind: a space containing books, writing, and the material conditions necessary for intellectual cultivation.

The painting suggests that space may be crossed by a mind capable of moving beyond physical boundaries. This capacity to transcend limits is shared by architecture itself.

In the work of Carlo Scarpa, particularly at Brion Cemetery, physical thresholds become poetic thresholds. Crossing from one space to another also becomes a passage between life and death, humanity and nature, memory and landscape. Alongside the tangible forms of architecture exists an invisible architecture of transition.

Brion Cemetery — Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione, 2017.

## Enric Mestre

### Architectures for Silence and Meditation

Building models become blueprints for larger constructions.

Sculptures of the hidden, the concealed, and the enclosed.

Enric Mestre's work draws equally upon the principles of classical form and the vocabulary of modern architecture and sculpture. He possesses an exceptional sensitivity to mass, planar relationships, and spatial proportion, translating the language of architecture into intimate sculptural objects.

His sculptures are enriched by the subtle and controlled colouration of their clay surfaces. The patinas possess a quiet complexity, relating more closely to the fabric of buildings than to conventional sculpture. Rough textures and smooth planes temper the austerity of the forms, while restrained colours distinguish individual surfaces and volumes.

Mestre's work echoes the sculptural beauty of expressive functionalist architecture. It carries the same austerity and asceticism while evoking a profound sense of memorial and elegy. These are deeply contemplative objects that move beyond formal exercises in harmony, proportion, chromatics, and composition.

Their quietness contains an unmistakable sense of *memento mori*. David Whiting describes many of Mestre's sculptures as possessing a sepulchral quality: repositories of memory, perhaps, or silent sentinels of an unspecified commemoration. They invite the imagination to wander through unsettling landscapes of urban fragments and industrial architectures.

Their cenotaph-like solemnity produces isolation and stillness, leaving the viewer to construct their own narratives.

— David Whiting

## Invisible Cities

*Italo Calvino*

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire—or its reverse, a fear."

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears. Even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules

The Drawing Stage : The Mark that Functions/Comes into a Mediality/Form/Language

Outpost 210524

Light Drawings/Duration/Surface/Intermediaries.

Drawing/Inscriptions/Mediality/Conversation

I created 'False Divisions' in an effort to name the parts which in practice are so multifaceted as to continuously express the existence of all others.

What defines/constitutes drawing? 

One thinks of its properties, line, marks, surfaces, its characteristic colourlessness, its acts, gestures, rhythms and spaces of thought.

Avis Newman.

The Stage Of Drawing-Gesture-And-Acts.

Avis Newman.

Catherine de Zegher.

As I made my choices, the body of the exhibition grew as an assemblage of parts comprising groups within groups, clusters, pairs, singularities, a 'body of relations' as one might understand a body of thought. In the selection and organisation, I tried to suggest that drawing is by definition in a state of flux finding inspiration in 'modes of thought' that are not linear. But which propose a space of fluctuations and overlapping relationships and allow for an uncertainty and a play between parts as in Melanie Klein's formulations of positions.

Drawing, draws us in close, into an act of scrutiny, retracing the drawer's movements between hand and eye is one of the profound pleasures of looking which connects us to a recognition of our own past acts. When we look, we enter the intimate space of a work that is as close to the action of an artist's thought as one can get.

Avis Newman understands drawing more fundamentally as to evidence the materialization of an act of consciousness, where a gestural act, embodies an act of thought. Her concern has been with the visual traces of those phenomena, which are embedded in all our actions and ultimately connect us through language.

In the inscriptive act of drawing there exists the shadow of our ambivalent relation to making marks, before the time when 'image' and 'text' are differentiated to go their separate ways. When one looks at a drawing there is a consciousness of the ghost of the 'text' in the 'image' in the Image. It is that combination of events where the mind simultaneously perceives in a single stroke the registration of a gesture affirming the existence of another, a line of delineation that speaks of this or that and the mark that functions (comes into a mediality) as a sign which possibly is connected to other signs. In such circumstances thoughts float between reading and perceiving. It is in this inscriptive nature of the activity of drawing that can hold we can hold in suspension this differentiated state of consciousness, irrespective of what is being drawn.

Generative Forms.

Drawing Assemblages.

Germ Cell/Idea/Breath.

The synthesis of Geometric with Organic Forms.

Christopher Wilmarth

Nine Clearing Works.

A portal, an architectural entranceway.

Wilmarth continually examined the concept of duality, contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality and ethereality. He employed a 'painterly technique' that emphasized the tactility and richness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform.

His sculptures retain the spiritual implications of 'place' endowed with particular qualities of light, clearings that can create a release, where light can open even when the place remains the same, just like the mind and new thoughts, creating moments of these pavement epiphanies of confinement and release.

Works from 1985 onwards contain and further develop a figurative impulse ( re-emerging of the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes) with the larger more emphatically abstract 'places'. Fusing the organic with the geometric and conjuring a multitude of symbols, head-soul-heart-aura-egg-germ cell-womb-cup.

Laura Rosenstock. 1989

A Clearing for a Standing Man. 1974

Poetics of place and person articulated by the evocative power of light.

He endowed his sculptures with a sense of  'Place' and 'Person' which was critical to his intension as was his lifelong concern with the evocative power of light.

Light gains character as it touches the world, from what is lighted and who is there to see. I associate the significant moments of my life with the character of light at the time. The universal implications of my original experience have located in and become signified by kinds of light. My sculptures are places to generate this experience compressed into light and shadow and return them to the world as a physical poem.

On Mallarmé, Wilmarth notes that his imagination and reverie meant more to him than anything  that was actually of this world. His work is about the anguish and longing of experience not fully realized, and Wilmarth found something of himself in it, especially the feeling that for Mallarmé 'the essence of a work consists precisely in what is not expressed'.  

Christopher Wilmarth. 

Christina Iglesias.

Shelters

Ceramics of Organic Abstraction.

A loosely defined style characterised by an ongoing exploration of biomorphic or organic form and surface.

Garth Clark.

Rising Above The Polemic : Organic Abstraction in British Ceramics. 1995.

References to landscape and natural phenomena, nature's associations of fecundity, earthiness, process, growth and decay.

Gordon Baldwin.

Between Thresholds/Spatial Stories : The Unbound Articulations/Gestures of Drawing.

Outpost 200224

In the activity of thinking in drawing, a drawing is not seen as a historical item, but as an embodiment of contemporary spirit unravelling before our eyes, it is always in the present tense, always a becoming.

The Stage of Drawing, Catherine de Zegher. 2003 

The Mirrored Self.

Coded Imprints.

Invested Bodies.

Chronicling Space.

To develop her project of questioning, Avis Newman returns to the initial moment of tracing and considers the genesis of the mark, from the viewpoint of the original spatial play that the hand stages and the importance given to the gestures of the hand as recorded in the traces left on the paper. She considers that the very nature of drawing is its psychic investments that are bound up in the gestures originating from the hand. The hand captures what neither the eye nor language can grasp. The gesture, its movement in space is anterior to what is drawn and articulated in the trace (Gesture, Max Kommerl).

Spatial Concepts/Paths/Places/Lines

Drawing Thresholds that we pass through.

Spatial Stories.

Michel de Certeau.

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.

On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a 'proper.'

In short, space is a practiced place.

Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.

The essential structure of our being is of being situated in relationship to a milieu, as being situated by a desire, indissociable from a direction of existence and implanted in the space of a landscape. From this point of view there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences. Our/the perspective is determined by a phenomenology of existing in/of the world. 

Intimus/Interior Design Theory Reader.

Spaces-Between-Thresholds.

How a space of blankness of no thing is 'overcome' and 'changed' into a space of relationships and encounters.

On spaces crossed/paths taken by their particular thresholds.

A poetic spatiality on the telling of possibilities and multiple coexistences, that are solidifying into spatial allusions which remain on hold. For the viewer, observer the invitation is not to unpick this tangle which has no centre, but to take part in the game of multiplication. To set off on a journey alongside and go with its surface flows. Into its spatial enigma, its garden of abstractions and concepts, amide nascent states in nature.

Thresholds : Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa. 2017

Ina Macaione.

If painting presents being, the drawn line presents becoming.

Norman Bryson.

Threshold as a emergent liminal space between emotional, physical domains, merging and separating through spatial movements/vectors/viewpoints and paths of desire.

The Small Space of a Constructed Limit.

The concept of architecture is the crossing of a space, a volume contained in an infinite space that creates a spatial sensation that becomes physically felt as one enters the space contained by that which is unmeasurable and infinite.

On Reading Gestures/In Real Time from the Drawn Line.

Drawing Conversations.

The Blank Evolving Page/The Unbounded Self.

Working from undifferentiated spaces into spaces that have become in some way have become claimed and  formulated.

Drawing/Visual Investments/Acting through gesture and evidence of beingness.

Through the acts of drawing the image comes into being, it comes about through the accumulation of repetitive acts of marking/inscription that are not anchored and not preconceived.

Avis Newman has developed a project of questioning of what drawing is?

All writing is drawing.

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

Gesture as the other side of language, a muteness inherent in humankind's very capacity for language, its speechless dwelling in language. Gesture for Agamben is not an absolutely non-linguistic element but rather something closely tied to language. It is first of all a forceful presence in language itself, one that is older and more originary than conceptual expression. 

Potentialities. 1999

Giorgio Agamben.

The Spatial Development of the Manuscript. 1994

Serge Tisseron.

Exhibition Spaces.

In architecture we enter space and its poetics.

Wrapped Body : Ceramic/Textile/Wire and Wax on Gesso.

A complex set of 'Propositions' emerging through her/our reflection on the found material.

A curatorial practice in which the work of Art itself, and not a theory in need of illustration, generates the searching criteria for an exhibition, a creating/curating a methodology that parallels the creative process of an artist.

An exhibition that acknowledges the significance of fragmented moments of consciousness of spaces of uncertainty. The creator is the one who agrees to venture forth with no certainty and follow this thread, unwinding ahead of him like Ariadne's thread and falling behind him like a spider's web.

The Stage of Drawing. 2003

Catherine de Zegher.

Avis Newman has long approached drawing as what she calls, an act of consciousness, an affirmation that I am conscious, I exist marked in a trace left by the gesture on the page. Her conception of drawing as a generative space of thought is a the very core of her practice and her selection for this exhibition.

A page that though blank is never truly empty.

Communicative Space Of Drawing : Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

 Outpost 081223

The Communicative Space Of Drawing.

Braking down research.

Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

Re-combinent poetics/praxis.

The Architectural Scriptorium

The Photographic Darkroom.

The Observatory.

Drawing, defined variously as an extruding, a gathering and/or a pulling closer.

The paradoxical nature of drawing is that it is simultaneously a form of recording and invention, somewhere situated between unconstrained gestures and the reiteration of a point of view.

To re-examine the significance of the human body through drawing performatively and architecture.

To understand how buildings affect individuals and communities emotionally, how they provide people with a sense of joy-identity-and place.

Across The Space Of A Page.

Drawing Propositions/Propulsions from the Body.  

Landing Sites: Organism/Person/Environment

The World Opens Up In Front Of Us And Closes Behind.

The experience of our bodies, of what we touch and smell, of how well we are 'centred' is not locked into the immediate present, but can be recollected through time and memory.

Collisions with Bounded Spaces.

The Haptic and Geometric Grid/Centripetal and Centrifugal Radials. 

Haptic choreographies/circulations that create collisions with environments and bodies.

Body 'fit' and movement is affected by the haptic sense and by the tactile qualities of the surface and edges we encounter.

Patterns are composed mostly of paths and places, but it is the system by which they are related, that allows us to make sense of a bounded space.

Place and its choreography of collision that facilitate the transaction between body, memory and architecture, allowing us to dwell in them in the fullest sense.

All architecture in its beginnings was derived from a body-centred sense of space and place. The power of the home, comes from its being the one piece of the world around us which still speaks directly of our bodies as the centre and the measure of that world.

Buildings can encourage a choreography of dynamic relationships among the persons moving within their domains. 

Emily had been playing house in a nook right in the bow of a boat and tiring of it, she was walking rather aimlessly aft – when it suddenly flashed into her mind, that she was SHE.

Gaston Bachelard.

Poetics of Space.

Emily was neither particularly conscious of, nor looking at, the centre from which she was departing – nor the centre towards which she as walking. But she was able to detect her identity in the bodily act of moving from one centre to another, she recognized that SHE had been withdrawn and was now emerging.

How can the personal world of the body provide an alternative to excessive and disorienting events in the environment?

To diminish the importance of the body's internal values is to diminish our opportunity to make responses that remind us of our personal identity.

Memories at the Centre.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Bloomer/Moore.

John Latham.

Drawing/Unbounded Sensations of Time.

The Stage Of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

Conversation : Avis Newman/Catherine de Zegher.

CdZ: What happens in the space between the gesture moving away from the body, towards everything that is outside of the self, and its landing as a trace on the page?

AN: I was thinking on the way the transmission of thought can depend on the hand and eye, and how this relates to the psychic space in which the mark exists as a potentiality. The effort of the mental and physical act of projection out from the body, away from the body, firstly into the air  -  an act that pitches the hand across the space of the page to site a mark where one intends – is quite a precise act : the most thoughtful and deliberate of acts, which I would speculate harbors a necessary thoughtlessness, in the sense that the certainty of coordinated actions is always in some way provisional and as such relies on the vigilant cooperation between eye and hand.

CdZ: Drawing may also be a recovery of the gesture that allows a discovery for the eye.

AN: To retrieve the gesture in a drawing is to translate the mark back into the action of the hand. It is very pleasurable to recover the gesture in that way and in so doing to follow the action of making. I think that experience in a drawing is very precise.

CdZ: Because the eye manages to discern what has become a trace on paper from a gesture in the air?

AN: Yes, the mind's eye. Perception becomes an act of reconstruction that moves unobtrusively between interior and exterior. I would make an analogy here between how we experience unconscious emotions in the repetition and accumulation of marks (irrespective of what is being drawn) and the intonation, hesitations, and inflections of speech, all of which hold a complexity of messages and can be at odds with what appears to be said, but which nonetheless determine meaning. It seems to me that this occurs independent of sight, as that which is generated by the mind and mediated by perception.

CdZ: In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time.

AN: My concern in making images relates more closely to the conceptual space of drawing, which is less circumscribed  than painting. In particular, the manner in which the boundary or edge comes to define the work is of a completely different order in drawing. In fact, the idea of inside  and outside does not occur in the same way. The marks define a position across the surface and are not registered in relation to limits. As a result the often ambiguous nature of borders can leave a vague uncertainty as to the stability of the image.

CdZ: Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?

AN: The natural inclination of mark-making is a relational organisation of individual inscriptive acts, which is not an expression of a unitary world. The frame as the window on the world, which traditionally internalizes the picture. This view creates an illusion  of the unique experience of looking, in the sense that there is coherence to the image. There is not that illusory consistency in drawing, as the space and image are essentially open-ended and speculative. The unframed interferes with any anticipation we might have of ordered limits or completion, and suggests the possibility that something is missing and will always elude our attention, because it cannot be framed. It is the uncertainty of the edge and how it meets the real that I find fascinating.

CdZ: Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?

AN: There is no pressure from the outside inwards; in drawing, it bis all pressure from the inside outwards. And the idea of boundary then becomes problematic, our boundary as we project it onto the work. The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional, and when one looks, for example, at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17'' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space – this is not part of  drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Sense/Sensing/Feeling/Memory.

Hapticity and The Body of Memory/Experience.

Haptic drawings are composed of piece by piece responses to the situation at hand, rather than being based on any kind of visual or conceptual grand design.

The stone and wood of a house itself are embodied in these memorable centreplace's and even they belong to the body of memory, something that maybe regarded as possessing uniquely haptic properties.

The heat  from a fire, the rushing water in the fountain, and the smooth tactile objects on the mantle deliver feelings of touch and even permanence. Here in this interior space the lifetime memories of the person collaborate with the timelessness of the world outside.

Exercises on the Haptic Experience of Space.

Drawing Choreographies : Hapticity/Mark-making/The Body.

All architecture functions as a potential stimulus for movement, real or imagined. A building is an incitement to action, a stage for movement and interaction as such it is one partner in a dialogue with the body. 

Egon Schiele/Jenny Saville, drawings rendering an insistent corporeality.

Drawing marks that can be possessed, felt, touched and known, haptic drawings are memories of human experience, seeing, feeling, experiencing and exploring corporeality.

Acts of Inscription : Drawing into Affirmations from a Primal Site.

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Drawing/Poetry/Images.

Sensing/Drawing Energy.

Water/Clay/Fire.

The mental energy of engagement in drawing and how 'markers' of an action translate the murmurings of the mind.

Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, through a synthesis/reciprocity of reverberations of matter and its mental movement.

Gaston Bachelard illustrates how images bridge the sensate perceived world and the interior affective life.

Bachelard's seminal philosophical and phenomenological interests are always connected to matter. To what he calls the psychology of the familiar, the rapprochement with real objects, and the friendship of things. 

Matter sparks inner images which in turn imbue matter with memory and values. He creates an ever renewing reciprocity of the reverberations between inner and outer qualities, which obliterates any absolute separation between objective and subjective experience, a perspective recognized by modern physics. Bachelard explodes the potential imprisoned in an image. It is the quality of the 'livingness' of the flame that triggers Bachelard's musings of correspondences.

Joanne H. Stroud.

 

The Flame of a Candle.

Student Work.

Charcoal on paper.

Drawing Course, Michael Grimshaw. 

Winchester School of Art. 2003.

 

Drawing The Line.

Affirmations from a Primal Site.

Corollaries between being and becoming.

The Mirrored Self.

Coded Imprints.

Invented Bodies.

Chronicling Space.

The Moment/Instants of Engagement.

The conditions of making where the image was not a priori to its making.

The Simultaneity of Effects.

A 'Graphism' In A Corporeal Field.

I am concerned with the movement and process of articulation, of marking and sensing of things across the works surface/duration. I would definitely identify drawing with the infinite space of sensation, both the sensations of the body and the sensations of the mind.

So what is it that one actually makes in such circumstances?

For Newman, it seems to me that the thing made becomes like a temporal spatial/sensate matrix, composed of a continuous repetition and elaboration of individual, but similar inscriptions, and that the series of thoughts and judgements connected to those separate acts, are only subsequently reflected on the image. Marking  the image, these marks suggest an endless repetition and while also existing as a series of relations. The marks suggest the thing could fall apart at any moment. 

Acts Of Inscription.

Drawing on Bodily Impulses.

Images from the mind.

The Psychic Gaps In Drawing.

Primary Forces : Marks of no particular visibility.

Drawing on the sensation of seeing and sensing that always seems to register the endless repetition of remaking, as such drawing constitutes the space of anxieties. 

I understand the page to be a mobile space in the physical presence of its weightless surface and as such it is a place of time and movement. The evokes the consciousness of that limitless space that is embodied in the reality of the white page. Which I would say is a place of fragmentation that has since Modernity been an interminable potentiality, symbolically the dreadful place of boundlessness.

In a drawing the page keeps open the gaps between the marks. It refuses closure and is an active participant in conjunction with the mark. It is part of a negotiated reality of void and presence. The limitlessness white space of the page disperses the notion of its body as substance, its body is phantasmic and intangible space/surface.

The notion of the white page as being boundless, also alludes to that space of our inner reality, where the immaterial world of dreams/imagination and the mental impressions that run through us and evaporate into other thoughts. They dissipate in the fragmented world of our senses and defy any totalizing.

Avis Newman 

Mark Making : On the fascination and the fear of the white page.

For Avis Newman, the paper is an undifferentiated space in that it references the primitive undifferentiated space of the infantile body that has to be claimed by the self.

Drawing is a site in which one enacts differentiation, as soon as a mark or sign is made, it changes the non-ness and establishes a place of action, as soon as that act occurs the paper becomes something, it moves towards, moves with its potentiality into language.

Could we state that one aspect of drawing tends to be more linked to the bodily impulse and the other to the mind?

Catherine de Zegher

The image that Antonin Artaud conjures when he says 'There is a mind in the flesh, a mind as quick as lightning,' situates it well for me. I have the impression that the act of inscribing opens a fissure through which some staged psychic event, operations of consciousness, take existence. They are primary forces with no particular visibility.

Avis Newman.

Marks both coded and uncoded originate in an urge from a space of uncertainty to participate in language. The potentiality of even a blank page is in itself the unbounded space of language. Drawing is both a system and a method of a sensing inquiry. To draw is often a paradoxical act in which two extremes of practice can exist in the same space.

When we come to look at another's markings in the world. We see an extraordinary event. We see attempts at articulating the unbounded space that momentarily binds that aspect of us that is eternally fragmented. Essentially in the very act of drawing we have a wish to externalize thought and communicate existence.

Avis Newman.

From Life : Extending The Speculative Drawing Process.

Bodily Boundaries : Transactions between body-intimate and the social body image.

Organism-Person-Environment.

Body-Fragmented-Memory-Architecture.

Propulsions/Propositions into and through the visual.

In drawing some marks escape their visibility, because there is no dynamism to underpin the possibility of internal cohesion. There is no pressure from the outside inwards;  in drawing, it is all pressure from the inside outwards.

Conduits of perpetual potentiality.

The articulation of marking thoughts, which by definition are open-ended, in a state of flux in which things can pass through and are suggestive of a perpetual potentiality.

Some marks are seeing, some are feeling, some are for thinking, some are from memory, others from a blindness when seeing.

Gestures and Acts.

Conversation/Correspondences.

Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with the infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?

In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time. Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?

Catherine de Zegher.

The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional to the boundary we project onto the work. When one looks for example at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17' ' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space, this is not part of drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.

Avis Newman.

In Drawing : One is not so much looking at the thing itself, as at its suggestion, at the possibility of a formation that has yet to occur. In that sense, drawing is both fugitive and embodies a lack, it is implying qualities of incompleteness and that which conjures to be only a trace of a thing.

Drawing/Corresponding to a mobile field of properties that only during the process of marking is a cohesion found, a somewhat precarious frame constructed, almost as a byproduct of the articulation of marking thoughts.

Drawings are beyond the conceptual anxiety found in connection to the frame of painting.

In drawing the surface maintains its separate existence. There is an ambivalence of status between the mark and its support, consequently the lack of integration has always been more complex, corresponding as it does to a mobile field of properties. 

Drawing as a site, a meditation of a self regarding consciousness. Where consciousness is understood/expressed as a process that 'figures/thinks' a state of existence. Drawing and the drawn become a site of inquiry, response and invention, and in that sensing space it becomes a philosophical activity.

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. The fractured, open-ended, and incomplete that are inherent characteristics of drawing practice seem very pertinent as materializations of our present experience of the world.

It is that space of anxiety and fragmentation in contemporary practice that offers a potential of infinite diversity. Drawing is a record of the working of thought, that we see embedded in the drawn.

Conversation, Avis Newman. Catherine de Zegher.

The Stage Of Drawing : Gesture And Act.

Drawing/Moving Bodies : Spatial Thresholds : In architecture we enter space and its poetics.

Outpost 270224

In the body of knowledge, there is a mind in the flesh quick as lighting.

Artaud/Newman

Drawing ultimately corresponds with/to a mobile field of properties.

The Haptic Engagement.

The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

In drawing it is this potentiality and instability of the 'framed image/object' that reinforces our uncertainty  of any definitive definition. We are not so much looking at the thing itself, but at its suggestion and its very possibility in a formation that has yet to occur. There is the uncertainty (and its anxiety) as to what stage of language it is, in its becoming.

Looking with the eye and touch of an artist, even to a point of scrutiny, while keeping the societal content in which they emerge in mind. What forms the overall connection between the drawings in the exhibition is the value attached to gesture, as a primordial act of consciousness and to its trace on the paper. 

Catherine de Zegher, Avis Newman.

Drawing is conceived in the midst of loss and anxiety.

Within the realm of visual representation, drawing is present as an act of tracing absences. 

Opened and closed by the mark, an inscriptive game that is both motional and emotional, that enables an active control/participation over separation anxiety. While at the same time unlocking the way to the child's independence.

The earliest drawings are not guided by visual exploration of space, but by an exploration of movement and spatial concerns.

Bodily responses to drawing acts, of trying to bring about a visible language from visual inscriptions. Gestural traces in drawings evidence a continuous process of situating being/becoming.

Drawn from the body of knowledge into the/onto the surface event of experience. 

Drawing for me always seems to manifest the endless repetition of remaking, and as such as a sensation  it constitutes the space of anxiety, a childhood anxiety.

Moving Bodies

Spatial Thresholds

In architecture we enter space and its poetics.

St Jerome in his study.1474-75.

Messina examines 'earthly limits', St Jerome is sitting in a small study that seems to have been dissected to reveal its interior. The place, environment for his writing and any other material needed to cultivate his mind. As if to say that space can be crossed with a mind capable of entering  and crossing limits. This is the greatness of the mind, and also in architecture, that it is capable of crossing/entering spaces beyond there physical limits. In transcending physical limits Scarpa is setting up a spatial poetics of liminal spaces, is perhaps the main theme of his work at Brion Cemetery, alongside of the real physical and actual architectural figures of solid material. Thus for Scarpa, every time a threshold is crossed the limits between life, humanity and nature in the landscape are traversed as well.

Brion Cemetary by Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione. 2017. 

Enric Mestre.

Architectures For Silence And Meditation.

Building models, blueprints for larger constructions.

Sculptures of the hidden, the concealed and the enclosed.

The work of Enric Mestre is much indebted to the principles of ancient classical form as to the vocabulary of modern architecture and sculpture. He is an artist who has a particularly sensitive feeling for massing, for the planar and spatial relationships of contemporary building, and how to size this down into pieces which possess their own particular intimacy. 

His works are  enhanced by the nuanced and controlled colouration of their clay fabric. Mestre produces patinas of great subtlety and variation that relate more to the fabric of a building than to traditional sculpture. Gritty open textures and smooth surfaces both soften and temper the austerity of his forms, in which he also uses sober tones and colourations to distinguish different sections, surfaces and planes.  

Mestre's work echoes the sculptural beauty of expressive functionalist building, it has the same starkness, the same asceticism that shares a strong sense of memorial and of elegy. They are deeply contemplative objects, that go beyond exercises in harmony, chromatics, proportion and formalism. 

They present a quietude that contains a profound sense of memento mori. For Whiting there is a sepulchre like quality about such of Mestre's work, for repositories of memory perhaps, sentinels of some unspecified commemoration. Sculptures where one's own imagination is allowed to roam in a disquieting world of urban areas and industrial like structures. 

Their cenotaph like solemnity creates a sense of isolation and loneliness, and we are left to make our own narratives, our own stories.

David Whiting.

Invisible Cities.

Italo Calvino.

With cities, it is as with dreams; everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires or fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful and everything conceals something else.

What is more mysterious than clarity?

What more capricious than the way in which light and shade are distributed over the hours and over men?

Eupalinos of the Architect.

Paul Valery.

Christopher Wilmarth

Drawing Into Sculpture.

Christopher Wilmarth (1943?1987), an American artist best known for his expressive sculptures constructed from plate glass and steel, was also an innovative draftsman. This compelling book?the first to focus on Wilmarth's use of drawing throughout his career?offers fascinating insights into his artistic practice and poetic personal vision. Edward Saywell considers three aspects of Wilmarth's drawings: his student and early works; the remarkable crossover that he made between two- and three-dimensional works in a series of drawings constructed from etched glass and steel cables done in the early 1970s; and the independent drawings he made directly after or during the construction of his sculptures as a means to think through completed work and to look forward to new creative ideas. Saywell also draws on previously unstudied materials, such as sketchbooks, preparatory maquettes, and letters selected from the Christopher Wilmarth Archive recently presented to the Fogg Art Museum by Susan Wilmarth-Rabineau, in order to shed new light on Wilmarth's working process.

Drawing Zones/Studios/Sites of Inquiry/Concern.

 

Outpost 230124

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.