This thesis is part of a critical exploration of what it means to say a drawing is 'delicate' . Delicacy is one of the poetic, aesthetic and psychological qualities closely allied with the history and practice of drawing. Despite these widespread associations, and the increasing prominence of this sensibility in contemporary fin e art practice, delicacy as an aesthetic and critical phenomenon in drawing remains critically underexplored. The research project; of which this thesis is part, examines qualities of delicacy in detail through practice as research - the making of art works- and a scholarly investigation of contemporary concerns in drawing. The aim has been to enrich our understanding of graphic encounters, sharpen and refine our language and add substance and definition to what we understand to be delicacy. The project uses comparative material drawn from case studies in costume conservation, archaeology and medicine in order to identify shared practices in negotiating the delicate, an approach which has bought into focus values of delicacy in drawing. As a result, new forms of drawing have been developed to expand existing graphic languages, which negotiate the poetic and intellectual understandings of delicacy. In doing so they give form and definition to what may be considered as a specific aesthetic category of delicacy. The study argues that delicacy is a hermeneutic and ethical concern, both a quality of certain objects and a phenomenal, experiential quality of life which describes our uncertain and intimate concerns. The forms of drawing developed have the ability to make this palpable. As a result, drawing is presented as useful and transferrable re search tool for accessing and analysing particular qualities of lived experience

Technological interventions, in combination with creativity and drawing skills, have altered the course of representation in art throughout history. The camera obscura, camera, data projector, and now digital technologies assist artists to make images that describe a world in motion. Learning to draw movement requires intense periods of connected looking, which can be difficult to maintain. Video Projection Drawing (VPD) integrates analogue methods of observational drawing within a technologically assisted environment. It is used in this research to retrain embodied responses when drawing a subject in motion from observation. This study combines practical investigations, workshops and performative collaborations with a review of relevant historical and technical literature. The quality of an energetic interchange experienced between an observer and an artwork, and the artist and the observed subject, is significant; so, where possible, observations are based on the viewing of original work, from cave drawings to contemporary art. In this study energetic interchanges are understood as phenomenological experiences where both parties affect each other. The practice-based research culminated in the show Shedding Skins (2011), which was divided into four spaces. Shedding Skins, a video installation on a Selkie theme, documented drawings of movement coming in being. The drawings that resulted from the processes captured on video were exhibited in the adjacent space. Dancing in Time, an in-depth study of drawing step dancing and Drawing with Light, videos and photo documentation of work carried out in educational settings were presented in the third space. The final room, a demonstration space, hosted The Energy Gift Exchange. For twelve days, the movements of visiting practitioners (musicians, actors, dancers and storytellers) were drawn using the video projection method. Participants from the visiting public, art school students, invited community groups and myself engaged in the Energy Gift Exchange and were observed learning to draw movement in the assisted environment. The resulting research documented here contributes to the field of contemporary Fine Art and to the debate on Fine Art training. It identifies a new role for observational drawing: to reveal movement that is seen but not easily separated from the observed event. The findings recommend reinstating observational drawing as a necessary part of Fine Art training. VPD proved to be an accessible method for all levels of artistic and technical ability. Drawing movement in the assisted environment improved looking, deepened engagement, extended familiar skills, developed new ones, retrained embodied responses, and encouraged an atmosphere of collaborative creative enquiry. Learning to draw movement requires a state of being and a course of action working together in concert with the observed situation — a condition which I call ‘connected looking.' The energetic quality that drives continuously unfolding events is captured in movement traces. This kinaesthetic trace results from an embodied response to the subject in motion through sustained, connected looking. Instead of a look-draw-look-draw pattern of behaviour as observational drawing training currently promotes, this method encourages sustained looking with the eyes, while the hand traces the eyes’ observations on the page. Assisted by lens based technology the observing body abstracts, translates and reveals previously indivisible lines of movement into drawing by learning to dance on the page.

No description available.

This interdisciplinary project investigates drawing as a form of looking, and the possibility of transcending looking, into perception. Words and photos constitute a text that weaves together distinctive strands; those of drawing, those of writing in italics (subjective, personal reflections: the journal) and those of academic writing with reference to scientists, artists and philosophers of relevance. The format is deliberately interdisciplinary, defying traditional academic conventions and proposing creative and hybrid interrelations of the visual with the verbal. The purpose of the text is to re-establish drawing as a means of perceiving and understanding, to gain insight. John Ruskin advocated drawing as a means of looking and self-education, encouraging all to learn to draw in order to love nature. In the text submitted here, the visual and the verbal are interpreting each other. The drawings form a visual journal alongside the written journal, exploring continuous narrative on paper and in notebooks. Research methods included walking, observing and collecting. The drawings aim to reveal a spiritual dimension of nature through descriptions of journeys and encounters, actual and imagined, with inanimate and animate beings, thereby visually presenting a stream of consciousness. Ruskin’s spiritual and moral view of art and nature provides much contemporary relevance in an age where the shortcomings of the ideologies associated with modernism have become recognised and critiqued. Philosophical and ecological considerations for the wellbeing of the life-world, the cosmos, have created a basis for a reappraisal of Ruskin’s legacy. Drawing and writing become tools to see the world and to build responsible relations with it. In order to be a good artist, a good drawer or writer, art needs to strive for moral integrity.

This practice-based project considers what happens when projected video/film is placed in combination with drawing, and vice versa. The research conceives of the staging of video projection installations and related works in terms of their spatial and temporal dimensions. The main approach both in my practice (which focuses on drawing and video installation) and writing, aims to realign the layers of projected images in which bodily engagement performs as discontinuous transition. Since filmic media dematerialize the trope of bodily engagement, the drawing activity seeks its way of survival through performativity, promoting temporal continuity in a ritual manner. The text considers selected works by Pipilotti Rist, Dennis Oppenheim, VALIE EXPORT, Peter Campus, Joan Jonas, and Pablo Picasso in detail. Rist’s work is examined and critically interrogated as an example of immersive illusionistic video installation. Dennis Oppenheim’s Two Stage Transfer Drawing is considered as an example of kinetic transmission through the sensory body, which creates layers of images and screens (or interfaces). Using the physicality of projection, VALIE EXPORT’s Auf+Ab+An+Zu expands its filmic images into the real space, in which participants are invited to mark the real space of the screen. The text asks how this work reconfigures the space-time of its multiple performative elements. Peter Campus’s work is introduced as a productive example of the possibilities of closed-circuit installation. By manipulating the materiality of the screen, Joan Jonas’s complex video performance installations take this possibility even further, generating the screens’ own spatiality and temporality, as in the work Glass Puzzle, which is described in detail. Both of my text and practice focus on the materiality of the screen and consider how it can be rethought or restaged through bodily engagement.

This practice-based investigation offers an understanding of the role of the body in drawing. The research proposes that drawing is not only connected to movement but can be located in a larger inquiry into the performative nature of human activity. Analysis of artworks produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s provide a context and operative means to explore duration, expenditure of energy, measurement and time, in relation to practices of performance and drawing. The examination of these artists’ works is provided to inform an investigation of physical processes of drawing through performance practice. My inquiry also Ieads to an encounter with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body as a primary means of understanding our relationship to the world, in particular the ‘flesh’ as a porous interface that dissolves the boundary between subject and object. This underpins an analysis of performance-based practice that also seeks to investigate the act of drawing and embodiment. The aim of the research is to investigate how the body as an instrument can be explored through malleable qualities of drawing. This includes a process of adopting Euclid’s definition of the line as a model to explore linear properties beyond conventional mark making. Comparative analysis of works by Carolee Schneemann and Matthew Barney provide material that has been a key influence upon the research process. These works have influenced the trajectory of my performance art in the exploration of resistance, tension, measures of energy and endurance. My consequent practice interrogated how the body moves through space; using (myself) the runner to articulate a form of drawing that tested the body’s physical limits. A moment of transformation and change occurred when I began to articulate ‘running as drawing’. Vital to this, was an understanding of using ‘breath’ and the discipline of marathon training to introduce how the physical act of running can be a viable form of drawing.

This thesis is an investigation into performance-based drawing and its relation to ‘multiplicity’, as explored through a philosophical tradition of thought. By leading my research through this practice, where I use bodily gesture to engage a mark-system exploring ‘the point’, I ask how thought in drawing could be imperative to its event (of thinking and making). I examine the proposition that by making physical performance the question of thinking in its event can be critically investigated under a trace that indicates thought as multiplicity. I argue that ‘the point’ is a unique, conceptual mark that emphasizes bodily appearance; and that this mark engages physicality through properties of mediation, dislocation and obstruction. These properties are demonstrated throughout my practice as ‘post-phenomenological’, that is the irreducibility of bodily presence and indexical imprints to ‘thought’. In my practice I construct performances using marks associable with notation, such as periods [ . ], brackets [ ( ) ], or ellipses [ … ]. These notational marks structure the space in which a dislocated form of bodily gesture occurs – as in standing, turning, or pointing – which is mediated by weight and restriction. While my thesis closely examines my practice I look at artists – such as Paul Harrison and John Wood, and Trisha Brown – who explore indexical mark-­‐making, task-­‐based actions and digital video. I therefore examine how I use gesture to investigate a non-­‐representational trace, which challenges drawing through conventions of line-making and embodied movement, or inscription. Throughout my thesis I examine post-­‐structural debates around ‘multiplicity’, a philosophical notion of thought posited as a radical question. I evaluate ‘multiplicity’ 3 through Alain Badiou’s critique of Gilles Deleuze’s vitalist proposition (that thought is engaged materially through movement) and thus consider that thought/multiplicity is void-­‐like and obstructive. I articulate Jean-­‐Luc Nancy’s notion of ‘exscription’, that gesture is dislocated from inscriptional marking; this dislocated gesture being unable to engage with thought under phenomenologies of presence. Finally, I consider Maurice Blanchot’s argument that the trace as such – as distinct from the imprint of a line – is impossible to both represent and materially depict as ‘presence’. My research aims to reconsider conventions of performance-­‐drawing, placing greater emphasis on bodily gesture and a conceptual trace that interrupts embodiments by either imprint or physical presence. Overall, I propose a new approach to mark-­‐ making under a post-­‐phenomenological method, which uses a dislocated gesture to investigate an obstructive event of thought or multiplicity.

This is the written component of a practice-led Phd concerned with the space of drawing. The space that drawing is seen as being able to occupy has undergone significant changes in last ten years. In this thesis I consider the historical and theoretical background to these changes with direct reference to particular ideas and work that are both important in tracing this history and to my own practice. My discussion is centrally concerned with the efficacy of theories for drawing as they relate to practice, rather than as pure descriptions of practice. I begin by addressing the particular character of writing about drawing identifying some of the possible misunderstandings of this writing that may arise for the practitioner. I then trace significant changes in theoretical and material ideas of space in the last one hundred years that have contributed to the new space of drawing. I discuss how contemporary drawing installation reflects this reconfigured space and ways in which it might expand upon it. The key ideas of this study are then turned towards my chosen technique of collage. In the final chapters I describe and reflect upon the theoretical implications of the practice of this research.

No description available.

Since childhood, drawing has been a constant method and medium of enquiry for me, a medium that is beyond the term ‘art’, that is an instinctive physical and perceptual response to phenomena. As such, it is a natural development for me to desire to understand this phenomenon, to question the act of drawing as a mode of communication that appears to be so suitable to my understanding. This has led to a period of research into the formal structures of drawing, to ask how abstract marks on a ground can be of use to our understanding. Developed to question the universal relevance of drawing, this study is a practice-led investigation into the formal tectonics of drawing practice. As such it charts a period of research that comprises a re-learning of the building blocks of drawing practice in an effort to better understand how drawing influences how we encounter the world or, how drawing structures visual perception. Part I begins by outlining the historical lineage of which this thesis is a continuance, positioning the research as a non-essentialist, moderate manifestation of the formalist position. Part I proceeds to employ drawing as an analytical tool, to compartmentalise a past drawing into seven distinct components, identified as united within the diversity of the drawing process. The seven components are not original in their connection to drawing, and therefore do not, by their mere presence, comprise an original contribution to knowledge. In fact it is the universal acceptance of the components as the formal scaffold on which most drawings are built, that enables a rigorous interrogation of their properties to be undertaken, further explored and developed so that an understanding of how these components structure the visual perception of the drawer can be reached. Adopting the seven components as seven separate lines of inquiry, Part II establishes the Components of Drawing. Each is subsequently analysed and extended through my practice, theory and pedagogy. Within this process drawing operates as the principal originator, developer and vector of the hypothesis, the core of the investigation being a heuristic analysis of the structure of drawing that mobilises the components of drawing from a subconscious by-product of process, to a conscious understanding of the purposiveness of each mark made. The study concludes with a reflection on the research period in response to the hypothesis outlining the original contribution to knowledge, before positing possible future areas for further research.