This practice-based research project explores how a choreographic view of a physicallyinformed drawing practice can serve to articulate and generate new understandings of material relations between moving bodies and static, receptor surfaces. Using task-based studies and other systematic structures of working that activate the horizontal plane of the floor, the research reveals how different configurations of relations between bodies, surfaces, and materials such as charcoal and paper, can mediate and extend a reciprocal touch between body and surface. Rather than on the production of finished artwork, emphasis is placed on processual activity and the working conditions from which material and visual residues emerge as evidential remains of reciprocal touch. The research is organised around the key terms intersect, surface, and body that operate as working concepts and facilitate a way of organising the observations and findings of the practical investigation into distinct areas of enquiry while recognising that these areas increasingly overlap and complicate one another. The thesis is extended through a critical engagement with ideas of non-human agency and materiality developed in the work of Harman (2013), Bennet (2010) and Barad (2013) and a reconsideration of horizontality through Steinberg’s notion of the ‘flatbed picture plane’ (1972) which informs a choreographic view of drawing in relation to orientation and surface distribution. The thesis is further contextualised through a consideration of the choreographic conditions presenting in performance works of choreographers Trisha Brown, La Ribot and Janine Antoni that extend across choreography and visual art contexts. The thesis aims to contribute to recent discourse in the field of choreography concerned with how a co-presence of human and non-human forces can be incorporated into choreographic processes and how drawing can present as choreographic knowledge through a consideration of material agency in approaches to performance-making.

This thesis explores the ways in which the production and comprehension of drawn narratives are structured by metaphorical conceptualisation. The argument develops from the observation that metaphor theory does not account for the perceptual character of depiction. I begin by focusing on an overlooked distinction between "pictures that are metaphors" and "pictures that have metaphors as their textual content" made by Richard Wollheim. This leads into the elaboration of a theoretical model of depiction-as-metaphor, which contributes to analytic philosophy as well as metaphor studies. In the fourth and fifth chapters, I argue that common nonpictorial drawing devices including speech balloons and motion lines operate as reifications of cognitive construal operations. Applications of metaphor theory to comics have generally focused on identifying the operation of metaphorical structures previously proposed through research using linguistic corpora. This strategy is frequently employed in the thesis, but I extend it by bringing to bear a wider range of cognitive processes that highlight the role of visual perception in cognition. My theoretical framework synchronises the accounts of unconscious cognitive processes developed by, in particular, George Lakoff and Lawrence Barsalou, with philosophical accounts of depictive seeing as a self-conscious imaginative use of one’s own perception, amongst which the work of Kendall Walton is highlighted. The formal study of comics is replete with theoretical frameworks derived from linguistic models of signification, but much less attention has been paid to developing models that approach the artform as a species of drawing rather than writing or literature. My thesis contributes to redressing that imbalance. My synthesis of depiction and metaphor extends the application of metaphor theory to drawn multimodal texts. The challenges it proposes to the Lakoffian model of metaphorical cognition are in keeping with contemporary scholarship, and contribute to the ongoing work in understanding metaphor’s central role in cognition.