Drawings showing the interior of mouth, being inside a yellow rose, and fir cone explorations.
Cassie and Carol have started some expressive drawing sessions in St Peter’s Church. What a lovely opportunity to play together.
These are some sketches- an experimental, experiential approach to drawing.
This body of work is emerging out of a residency with Virtually There. I am working with in an open enquiry about materials and layering. I envision finished pieces as photographs (re-assembled as photographs) but for now they are held here in sketch form. These drawing have been made in dialogue with young people at Killard School and a largely based on a sense of being together for a short time in a public park, our dialogue took place afterwards online:
Drawing assembles from a collection of things: material and colour and gesture. The yellow, wet and the way it affects the paper – dimpling puckering and pooling in draws in, collecting – does the liquid draw the paper around it, a protective gesture or does the paper embrace the liquid, also protective, this drawing is about that – belonging in the environment.
This is another drawing assemblages using Yellow. Cut drawing as well as mark drawing. Themes of covering and obscuring run through this body of work, concealing and revealing.
drawing with shape and form. This is part of a large piece which took over my studio, hanging from the rafters, ideas are collaged together loosely hanging – ready to move, nothing is stuck down.
This Drawing is a different kind of assemblage, there is a figure mapped out in pen and ink represented in a landscape and there has been an intervention here, a weathering, the drawing is layered with other kinds of mark-making, is it debris? Or an explosion? The yellow is joyful, the gesture is joyful here but sprung from behind the figure – is she aware of it? There is a more systemic patterning above the figure, yellow once more but neon this time, electric, perhaps a thought pattern, the inside of the figures mind? A softly pastel coloured geometric pattern appears left, again hints of yellow with peach and pink and pale blue could this be a pod of some kind, a more formal element, there are other shapes like utterances floating in front and above, and there are other layers holding the elements in space.
This is a collaborative drawing I made with a student, we were experimenting with layers and graphic imaging tools on an interactive whiteboard. Included here is an image from the David Hockney exhibition we visited, recalling the trees which gave us an unforgettable experience at Mount Stewart, the idea of proxy is contained in this drawing, the sutdent’s avatar and Hockney’s image standing in for an experience we shared. Here we are adding to the imagery drawing over it with digital tools.
Here is the avatar again printed and placed over one of my drawings of our trip to Mount Stewart.
Drawing in layers detail mixed media
Drawing of the coney lanterns at Mount Stewart, transformed into a mountain (in my mind verbally this locates with the fabled Coney Island, I’ve never been there but I know how it figures in the American psyche. ) The repetition of this image carries through all iterations of drawing cycles.
Aims for this project are to create a drawing room an immersive environment drawn together with collected iterations and assemblages from the project.
I have been feeling my way here. Drawing has been beating in the background, quietly sustaining a practice. Drawing is a current with a pulse. My present work is to bring drawing to the fore. This excavation is where my interest lies; curiosity is at its height when the destination is elusive, and drawing is the expression of working towards, of seeking, perhaps never wholly finding, hopefully encountering surprising glimpses into the vastness of what it is to be, and finding it briefly in small moments, attention to a detail that has been overlooked or hidden.
to understand
to probe
to meditate
to log
to visualise
to revisualise
to invent
to exhume
to explore
to extract
to express
to hone
to be
Adding, subtracting, trying new ways of seeing, understanding, logging, drawing is the basis for experimental thought. Drawing (not language) is the house of thought* .
At the Guesthouse Reading Group we are reading Martin Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, a response to Sartre’s existentialism (Sartre never replied)
I aim to open up the ek from Martin Heidegger – If I was in conversation with the philosopher I would suggest that he might try a drawing (not meaning to be trite)
…and so back to language, drawing is embedded in the idea of drawing out.
*Martin Heidegger p 254 Letter on Humanism
the human being is not only a living creature who possesses language along with other capacities. Rather, language is the house of being in which the human ek-sists by dwelling
Drawing: a lived mark
push and pull leaving a mark, gesture, rhythm and repetition,
back and front of clay tablet by Sienna age 6
* Affective Entities Exhibition curated by Sarah Kelleher, Rachel Doolin and Ann Mechelinck Wandesford Quay Gallery 2016
Scribble on damp paper found today amongst papers in studio…. 6 months ago.
Two currents one trapped in the paper bleeding through from the reverse, we know this from reading, the ability to read, the printed text bleeding into the paper a series of lines. Drawn over is some handwriting, hastily made between, on and over blue bled lines, scrawled observations from the curation of an exhibition
reads:
Aitlean
broom lightening
trapped moment trapped
in burnt wood charcoal form
A memory – neuropaths flashed branches reach out go where?
somehow light up the air – etch their paths’
trajectories a scramble a pointing a
collapsing
into the frozen tangle before me
elsewhere
pin pricks in paper, marking off days,
like the fabric pieces punctuating surface
orderly ordered rhythmic like the contents
of the collapsed bag – a photo of frozen breast
milk speaking volumes for a life that wasn’t
to be
the other forms now appear fetal, those thick glazed animal forms, not fully formed, or lacking edges, details that might delineate something not quite living
living on
adjustments to text carried out later in response to writing, drawing writing, making writing, reading writing, making sense, rewriting, redrawn
In the balance, gatherings, piles of (un)remembered desire ~ melancholia after Durer. Repossession and persistence. Contamination, anthropocene, monument.
Witness:
Remnants from a process stare back, they were there, they tell us little.
Cube containers, harbouring moulds, so live, accumulating, reaching out of the fruits
Sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, dancing: all the things we like doing are about surrender.
Brian Eno
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