Notes Page 17

Objects:

Responding to Familiar Things, Highmore (2011)

In what ways are objects important to my practice? I often draw on paper that as material is loaded with inference. Shopping lists on scrap paper collaged into other paper detritus from retail expeditions.
I use other altered, found, natural and non-objects. As source of ideas and also as material.
Working conceptually or should I say making conceptual art or should I say conceptualising conceptual art..?  adds a complexity to the idea of object (reflecting back on the recent tutorial where the presentation/display of the concepts is a problem) and how does this explore the 'danger of reification (the thing-ifying of cultural processes)'?



An exercise in ekphrasis:
I noted I used a technique of finding a way in to reading the object, not dissimilar to looking at an artwork when I began to write about this object. It's useful to step back from what is familiar to objectify it and then really understand its visual language. Something I don't often do with my work. The familiarity carries a lot of assumption about what is being communicated. To look at it objectively (and that requires consciously using devices like this) exposes these assumptions.

The slide is old.  There is a crack in it which adds a vulnerability to its already fragile tense (it’s glass).  The writing is ornate, cursive and dated. (although there is no actual date on it).

The description is bizarre and unusual, it says the image captured on the slide is of the ‘trachea of a healthy bee’. This is the only clue to what the image is of. 

 As you look closely you can see the magnified image of something that looks insect like, biological, microscopic yet enlarged.

As an abstract image its tone creates a 3d illusion. It is in fact in negative. Is a negative.

I'm not emotionally attached to this object.  I could have chosen the lego figure that has vigilantly watched over and entertained my children for years but I picked this up for the exercise. Because it's value is in being interesting, inspiring and curious.  Not in being familiar, nostalgic and sentimental.

Notes Page 16 tutorial

A tutorial.

I return to the beginnings to try and explain everything. The shopping lists get pulled out from all of the other dross. It's the simplest - yet strongest - has the most potential and can funnel the other theories and ideas. Some of the notes:

• .. ..creating  practices based within everyday experience, especially relating to walking and shopping.
• There are important questions of spatial and temporal organisation that are implied by the different kinds of depiction. 
• You are working in a conceptualist way which I think is developing some stimulating experiments. You can translate these working methods into more ‘realised’ images – this will be an interesting way of testing the boundaries of your practice. 
• using words alongside your mark-making projects. 
• There is something useful about the way that shopping lists overlap with the poetic memory experiments. 
• presenting the work? it might be that you need to create conundrums about the location of the work. 
• These questions about presentation are integral to your practice.

Kim miraculously helps me refocus and revives a mode of provocation.  I begin to get that the point is to utilise the one piece/experiment as a lens to view through.  I can expand/explore freely through it but by returning/reviewing, as you would with a viewfinder when drawing, it will hopefully keep some clarity.   I begin to sketch the significant themes through this frame; the everyday (and pedestrianism), memory (specifically archiving/capturing memory), drawing ( - line, repetition, ambiguity, interzone and more.....) and above all really questioning/provoking presentation/communication of process and conceptual art and I start to feel solid ground for the first time in ages.  

I look back on my latest abstract.  I can see how much of a sudden shift this new perspective has caused. Unable to articulate what it is exactly but knowing it has something to do with locating myself in the actual material practice rather than the theory/idea of it. Inside out rather than outside in? Research through practice not practice through research? I realise how far off I was and how myopic things can get by trying to wedge ideas into theories/fields definitively. There is a way of contextualising that locates but doesn't make it absolute and that skill evades me.......

Notes Page 15

The pedestrian blog for November ends today.
I'm collating the entries and extracting the significant ideas to marry up with theories I've been looking at.

As part of a symposium of work in progress I submitted the abstract below.
I'm hacking this up now and highlighting what needs defining, elaborating, ditching.... It's been a helpful process for refining the question(s).  I'm also helping to organise the symposium and this already has been an eyeopener.  It's so vital that an abstract lands the presentation in the right field/area, is explicit about the intention and is clear.  I'm not sure I had fully appreciated this before.

The difficulty of committing to a set of ideas holds me back.  So I"m publishing here to force some kind of decision......

Abstract: 

Lining up: What is lost (or gained) when drawing research is (not) pursued through lateral or non-linear approaches? Need to establish/define ‘drawing research’, ‘lateral’ and ‘non-linear as terms.  Attest why this is a purposefully ambiguous title. order/chaos?

Under the working title of Pedestrian I have adopted an experimental methodology of researching through walking. The notion of line is a recurring theme in my practice; as a formal system of drawing, as a wider philosophical subject and as allegory for investigating Research through Practice as a subject. So my research sits mostly in the field of Drawing Theory and Philosophy but has always wandered over tentatively into areas of psychogeography, autoethnography and phenomenology. Do I mention what I will be making or doing? Do I need to at this point? Explore/define psychogeography, autoethnography and phenomenology.

(also elaborate on disruption of line, wayfaring/wandering)

My proposal for this MA began with a concern for my working process.  I had begun to realise - in being of a very non-linear disposition, with a disorganised thinking style - to maintain a productive and logical practice within established models of practice and research I had adapted my behaviour.  I had modified. I had lined-up. And in doing so I had eradicated self reference, spontaneity, chance, even any expressive or emotional traces. I had objectified, controlled and constrained. Line as: retaining and recalling memory, repetitive nature of the action of walking (and trying to remember it) - documentation in ref to memory (eg camera synchronic to drawing/notation etc)

As this is literally knowledge gleamed from practice I rely heavily on current thinking around Research through Practice to contextualise this overall problem and convert it into data for the next phase. I have begun to form conclusions, for example; there are advantages to constraint and the paradoxical freedom it enables; my thinking style is of use in an autoethnographic methodology but I wouldn’t have been able to critique this without the previous experience. 

Bearing this in mind for the presentation I would like to explain how the background connects with the next phase and have identified for discussion three key aspects currently being explored:

• Considering walking as a form of drawing. 
• Pedestrianism as a metaphor for lateral thinking. 
• Drawing examined as rational production or phenomenological process against visual and cultural value systems.

Notes Page 14

Binary

Interzone (provide definition)
Ambiguity (refer to Tracey)
Liminality (provide defiinition)
duality
ambivelance

Parallax - maintaining an ambivelant position whilst shifting the view slightly each way...a perspective from multiple postitions....

“Interzone” captures perfectly the spirit of the region which is being described here: spatially, economically, socially, psychologically, spiritually, and mentallyInterzone, here, seems a term located at the very nexus of intersecting lines of global interests, passions, energies and violent eruption. e “Interzone” as a spatial metaphor designed to foreground mechanisms of exchange, fusion, and categorial shifting


William Burrows credited with the original phrase.


Analogy of Intersection (Traffic) : New/Old Architecture, Pedestrian/Motor, visible/invisible (drawing)

Lines are ambiguous - divisive and connective, a border is an interzone


white paper is an absence / ambiguous ... tracey guy on ambiguity adriana ionascu
autoethnography is also an ambiguous process/methodology

Notes Page 13

Studio Space Conversations:

A really helpful, thought provoking seminar with Majella on the subject of studios.  What five things are most important in an ideal studio?
Is there a 'post studio' culture that renders studio practice redundant?
Is the studio the context/environment for the work to be seen, so the space becomes the artwork?

I sat with a group of studio painters and drawers and printmakers.  I actually have not had a studio for a few years and am fairly nomadic in this.  If I'm honest, one of the main deciding factors in going for this MA was the studio space available (and that my space actually does tick all five requirements for me).
I suppose I have temporarily adopted a 'post studio practice'.  Situating myself in fields, galleries, launderettes, hostels and residencies.  What happens now I have a base for a year and how is this going to influence my work? It's a different process, planning performative happenings to making pieces. The walks are feeding into the work and there is a gap between the perceptions of the walks and the resulting responses: an area to investigate.  I am making some quick drawings on the walks and in their vitality they contrast with the investigations happening in the studio.

Notes page 12....more print

Drypoint and Photo Polymer

The drypoint process is satisfying in that it is autographic.  I made a drawing from a drawing of a walk (a remembered response to a walk).
The next step might be to get direct marks from the walks. Rubbings, tracings, casts etc. rather than impressions from memory.  The prints I made were interesting to a point but didn't provoke.  Not critical. 
Photo Polymer lines, details and tones produced are incredible and to capture resonances of the walks with this is a beautiful way to mark make but I don't feel like I'm challenging things. 

It might be more fruitful to explore further what happens when there is a distance between the drawing and the image so I can understand what characterises an immediate drawing in order to expand the conversation about what remains of the experience.

Notes Page 11

Daily responses to the everyday walks.

Notes page 10. Why Print?

 Photo intaglio is a lengthy but exciting process.
I knew I wanted to use an autographic technique and I knew I wanted it to talk of illusion.  I also wanted to mess about with the flat plane and tone and how to break down the difference in creating tone in this process compared to drypoint for instance. I knew I wanted to work on something observational.  Not so conceptual or expressive.  I wanted to make an image.  I drew this image with graphite.  The use of tone was instinctive and I 'felt my way'.  With drypoint or similar I have to think about inventing tone with the marks available. It takes planning.




It is still.  Not in flight.  It's flat. Not folded.

My plate was so subtle I thought it wouldn't catch any ink.

I got carried away with the incidental marks.  Finger prints from latex gloves?







The rag used to clean the edges of the plate became equally intruiging.






More so than the print.

Notes Page 9

Lygia Clark

Notes from seminar 1st November Kim Charnley

Caminhando is Portuguese for Walking 

I selected this piece because it talks about a lot of themes in my own work.  I discovered it by being given a mobus strip at a workshop on Practice as Research to demonstrate (phenomenologically!) how we can learn/expand/investigate/feel/think…. Just about everything by creating a mobus strip and then cutting into it - again and again (a lived experience).

Clark calls the act a propostition which makes me think of expansive openendedness, it gives things a future, a potential.  The democratic nature of participatory proposition is interesting as is the access and the accompanying instructions. 

Walking is one method I’m using to research.  

She said this:

The first time I cut the caminhando I lived out a ritual. Which was very significant in itself.  And I wished for this same action to be lived out with the greatest possible intensity by the future participants: it is necessary for it to be purely gratuitous and for you not to try to know - while you are cutting - what you are going to cut and what you have already cut.

If I use a mobius strip for this experience it is because it breaks with our space conditioning, the concepts of right - left, averse-reverse etc.  It makes us to live the experience of limitless time and continuous space.

The walking only started to make sense to me once when I was travelling by train and I felt each fragment of the landscape as a wholeness in time,  a totality.

I think we are now the proponents and , through the proposition, there must be a thought and when the spectator expresses this proposition he is actually putting together the characteristics of the work of art at all times.

The object is no longer there to express any concept whatsoever but so that the spectator can reach more responsibility for his own self.

Is there an eventual product?  Is this cultural capital.   

It amuses me to note that I misspelt the title Caminohando.  Inserting mistakenly Camino  -the spanish word for path  -creeping in to the Portuguese Caminhando.  And blending it with hand.

Walking Hand or Hand of the Path (drawing walk or walking drawing - drawking!)

 art objects as separate to the person who makes them interests me, Clark reconnects them.

She is also described as dwelling in not only  the poetic and cognitive issues of the individual but also the collective   She thought deeply about lines, folds, time so discovering her was a confirmation that my enquiry is valid.  I was folding aeroplanes out of paper and losing faith.  What was the point? 

Then I found Lygia Clark and she returned my self belief.

Notes page 8

Field Analogy

Notes from Kim's seminar:

1.11.17    What is a research field?

Field became an analogy for me:  

Field: it has boundaries, perimeters, fences. (these can be trespassed over if necessary)

Focus and relevance: Too wide or fenceless and the digging is not deep enough.

Ideas and philosophies - strain of crop

Similar thinkers with similar problems with commonalities - crop/inahbitants

Different disciplines/ideas create difference and more questions - alien crop (however this can cross fertilise and create more strains) .

Create a map of the research field - topographically but also geologically, the soil and the surface.

Robert Fairbrother, who digs........

Notes Page 7 - Collage

An old piece based on being in and wandering around a place called High Cross House. It's a collage.  It prompted me to try some collage with the maps to marry the marks with the folding with the plotting because it feels disconnected at the moment.  

It was an epiphany and I got overexcited on realising Guy Debord employed collage(Memoirs 1959) and now I could understand why. It felt like I was in the right company, huge confirmation I was resolving things. 

From my journal:

Collage seems to be the best and most appropriate solution to my issue of drawing walking.

It assembles and contains all the disparate but connected elements.  It is more than the sum of its whole.  Formally this process is about disrupting linear thinking.  It is literally a lateral coexistence of disparate elements. Culturally is speaks of communication, of interconnectedness, a material metaphor of the networked world. And possibly a way to encapsulate the simultaneous experiential elements of walking. I'm thinking it could also possibly be the bridge for the argument between conceptual and expressive modes.

November as a Pedestrian

Pedestrian is an umbrella title and one of my experiments within this is a month of documenting my daily, everyday walking activity beginning November 1st.
https://bethheaneyresearch.blogspot.co.uk/
I imagine it won't be of interest to anyone but me! But putting a time constraint on research in a project and obliging myself to publish brief notes is something I find useful (and also feeds another aspect under analysis re; my non-linear, scatterbrain thinking style).

Pastoral http://bethheaney.blogspot.co.uk/p/gallery.html now exists as a working document. I kept a journal and it was a dynamic, organic process that I am still using and adapting.  When I began the project I set myself rules and structure and this enabled free thought and open exploration. It helped me organise my observations, context, ideas, feelings, everything.. and kept it contained in one object (I still can't work out if this is the piece/artefact or whether one day it will be realised in a different way).

For Pedestrian the aims are - alongside the written blog notes - to make an instinctive (visual) response to each walk I log and as these are retrospective of the activity to examine a variety of time based recording methods (technological and 'analogue' or manual, old and new hopefully) to look at the space between what happened and what remains.

Observations to be considered:
Awareness of my body in various ways eg. objectively, subjectively, embodied.
The ambulation through obstacles.
Posture.
Auditory responses.
Emotional responses.
Sensory awareness
Self consciousness/invisibility
Track/trace/map/route/guide
Perception of time.
Interesting incidents....and my reaction to them.
Aloneness.
Socialness...
Converting knowledge (walking/drawing confluence/parallel/feedback..)


Themes:
Cartography
Spacial representation, perception
Bodily performance v mind performance.
Linear/non linear systems (the desire lines, habits, wayfaring/transporting - Ingold)
Narrative
Syntax of walking/drawing (dots and lines - Walking as writing or reading - Solnit)
Behaviours of walking (Mauss or Bourdieu)
Urban Design vocabulary, (confluence, furniture....) Semiotic readings, and designed control
Walking as a quiet protest. Pedestrian empowerment.
The politics of roads...
Documentation as product? What is appearing in the banal recounts of the walks?
Drawing and walking as a genre.

and on and on and on........

Notes page 6

Sunday, 29th October 2017

I don’t know why this is important but it was in my personal diary from September, perhaps it helps me think about the embodiment of walking in comparison to swimming:

The river has undertow, various currents and depths. It is not one line. Time varies, flow varies, direction is not uniform.

Swimming - the skin of the water, the shape of the liquid, the slow steady linemaking of the swimmers.  Doing nothing but swim in lines back and forth, a surface illusion of order.  The water isn’t behaving to order though, even though the currents, ripples and movements are subtle it is still happening. Acting against the ordered lines of the swimmers.

“The question expressed itself as a movement of emotion", I tried to look at this but I didn’t know what my emotions were.  You need a baseline emotion to be able to detect the other emotions ‘moving’.  Its a multiple emotion river: moving with the undertow etc.  We feel the river all at once - all the emotions (current) are present at once. 

Notes Page 5

Drawing locates me anchors grounds me - connection (pencil meeting paper in this case) with the/a material world (touch) is confirmation of my existence does. As does walking.

Ingold:  The landscape is a tapestry within which lives are woven, not a stage performed on.  "In all these ways-in their texture, their temporality and their literal embeddedness in a landscape of habitation - footprints differ from stamps.  Perhaps, then they should be likened to inscriptions, to lines traced in a surface rather than stamped upon it......in printing there is no relation between the technically effective gesture and the graphic forms it serves to deliver".

I've been dwelling here for a bit, wondering about the likeness of footprints to "as the actual trace of a gestural movement" rather than a print.  Thinking about the 'sensory experience of pressure commonly described as touch.

What I know:
In print the point of connection is the plate and the surface...
The print is rolled, in a pre-made form, it doesn't 'journey' through the landscape of the 'ground'
Print doesn't feel embodied, but inscription can happen-  Intaglio work - and this process could be seen as embodied and investigating touch.

Notes Page 4

A plotting of regular journeys around the supermarket using shopping lists as orientation. (What is the frequency of the journeys/walks? The inclusion of time along with movement would add a 'vertical axis'.)
I use a rough map made from memory of the store and then draw the route on this according to the shopping list (this acts as the score) taking a print from carbon paper underneath to arrive at the documented linear journey.
These results are simplified lines representing the route (as documents/records and/or non-maps)
I've overlaid some of them to experiment with repetition. (I'd like to expand the visual experimentation)

A direct response to the route. (As...... subway drawings)  The body is absent in the process and there is no dialogue between the ideas and the materials. it's printed so the gesture (see notes on embodiment/gesture - Avis Newman) is 'distilled'
There is no sense of movement (the walk itself) from the original activity and the non-maps.


As a functional drawing of words to assist memory - it's interesting to see sensitive mark/composition (who to evidence this?) emerge from the printing, a technique I wanted to employ to dissolve authorship and interrupt touch. Drawing locates me, anchors, grounds me with connection (pencil meeting paper in this case) with the/a material world via touch and is confirmation of my existence . So using print -and photocopying- to interrupt this can interrogate why: the point of connection being the plate and the surface and a certain amount of mechanisation is in action, the emphasis on the aesthetic seems more important than the embodied experience of drawing.

Is there an emotional language beyond the grammar of drawing, in the line itself?

When I look at the resulting drawings I feel something - and I don't believe it's my subjective autoethnographical? memory of the walks/journeys.

I'm beginning to use my invented word pseudocartography.....

In tandem to this is the shorthand piece I am investigating.  I commissioned my Mother (a retired secretary) to write, in longhand, a description of the view from her picture window and then transcribe it into shorthand. I have experimented with text as mark before and wanted to explore it further. I wasn't sure how this might relate to the shopping lists and worried I was reaching for familiar territory and repeating old work, but this revisiting has been important, is giving me insight and is not tangental but insightful.
It relates to Ingold's theory about text being linear.  The shorthand is like a cuneiform - each word or phrase is closer to being read at once, face on rather than in a line although it's still read left to right and makes a linear sentence, the characters are almost like phonic bursts and closer to ideas than words constructed in longhand. Looking at Mum's process like this and the lists with non-maps side by side is giving me more ideas but also insight into the way my non-linear thinking is operating.  I was trying to organise my development by forcing a linear iterative development from piece to piece but this has danced about and reflected back (mining old work) and forth and round and up etc.  Gyroscopic and (flat ontology - DeLander) rhizomatic (Delueze).

Notes Page 3 The liminal sweet spot

The space bet     


Practice As Research 

Practice Led Research - methods, problems, strategies, wrangling my wild creative wayfaring into a path....

Suddenly a key issue is the role of the research question in my work. To be ruled by the question means sticking to a path. Without the limit of the question the project lacks reason.  Something in my personality won't commit to a question.  It might tie me down. Now I'm questioning using questions. 

What on earth is my research question?

between reason and intuition.


After a whole afternoon programmed to accelerate some kind of resolution to our individual proposal questions I am more lost than ever.  I was frustrated and desperate after that day. I began to feel too chaotic and reached for structure but there was no structure to be found.  Suddenly all the theory existed on its own: free-floating without being located in practice.  I haven't been making and I found myself in the dreaded frozen zone of stuckness, just not moving at all, I needed a guide a route to follow.  A map.  The paradox being - I am the one who has to make the map..... so I just carried on making my maps of the shopping walks. There is obviously a richness to being inbetween the research and the practice but I haven't exactly found the sweet spot, more of a paradoxical nightmare..

Some questions I'm playing with...
How can my concept of pedestrianism extend to drawing?
How can drawing demonstrate the relationship between logic and intuition?
How does drawing facilitate a grip on reality...
How are linear systems played out in drawing?
How useful is habitual practice in drawing?
What is lost when drawing is constrained?
What is lost when drawing is liberated from linear culture?
How can we understand linear culture through creative chaos?
Is drawing concrete? (after Murdo Macdonald)
If drawing is an act of abstraction what is concrete?
What new knowledge is there in the (newish) genre of drawing and walking?



A chance meeting with a friend using walking and drawing in her PhD enlightens me.  She pulls out Delueze from what I'm saying.  I've been avoiding Rhizomatic thinking as theory because it's complicated and I get ungrounded when I go there but she leads me back safely to biting off a bit at a time and I know now how I can't not use him.  The other idea that gets pulled out from our chat is space and she recommends Doreen Massey.  I've been looking at Thibaud and others who discuss space and I'm thinking about systems of space as extensions of linear culture somehow.  Like a shift away from the psychology of linear thinking to psychogeography. And I'm still confused but there's a nebulous thread to follow (and I'm going to colour it pink on a drawing of a map).  And Delueze says Rhizomes are maps not traces........ but one person's map is another person's trace.... like my desire lines.
Help me.

Notes Page 2 (bonus material)

(Drawing) is said to demonstrate the relationship between reason and intuition, between sensory perception, interpretation and the process of understanding.
From Drawing Now Introduction, Tracey (2007)

This one sentence clicked it all into place (until it shifts again...*exasperation*).

It's a subtly different statement to what we understand of drawing (as a thinking tool, a method of expression, a performative act etc).  Could it be that drawing is the bridge to or the key for the space between reason and intuition.
Could I experiment with holding both linear constraints and  non-linear thinking style in order to exist comfortably in the space between.

Do my drawings, held by formal systems yet rejecting the very conventions describe this space?

Like the sense of freedom from repetition and routine it holds things steady while exploration and experimentation happen?

Roots and Wings.

It's not a contradiction or a paradox but a potent liminal space to be in.

Is it possible to excavate how drawing creates this?


Part of Pedestrian has been walking as drawing, each foot lands as a plot or dot.  I imagine a line
. ________________._______________.___________.     in between each stride: connecting. In this process  I gain understanding via the context of drawing systems: a lens to see through when walking and this serves as a constraint. It enables me to play with the walking and be led by it, intuitively into the yet unknown.  In the liminal space between constraints and 'wilderness' I find both structure for reason and fluidity of exploration.

Notes Page 2

Collapsed cat's cradle.
3d to 2d.
Plane(d)

Squashed under paper it was once a shape in space.
It was a continual thing.          I like the conversation it creates with just hands.
It needed two people talking shapes to continue it.
Now trapped in time.  Suspended on a plane. Yet still talking of its journey and a continuous story of  looped thread.

Notes Page 1

I'm using the working title Pedestrian for current research.  The kernal of this (a project titled Pastoral) is being revisited through the lens of being (a) pedestrian ALL of my life and through questioning the pedestrian, reserved, methodology I realise I've created.  The starting point was the proposal:

A study of lines investigated under the terms of drawing in order to challenge the layers of linear systems in the real and metaphorical world.

pedestrian |pɪˈdɛstrɪən| nouna person walking rather than travelling in a vehicle: the road is so dangerous pedestrians avoid it | [as modifier] :  a pedestrian bridge.adjectivelacking inspiration or excitement; dull: disenchantment with their pedestrian lives.

Been doing some plotting.... of my shopping trips and other routines and desire lines and pedestrian routes.

And have enjoyed lots of FOLDING......
planes; flat ones and paper ones.....how to make 4d drawings? How to understand Foucalt.
The fold as a '4d thing'.  The constancy of all time and possiblilities at once.
Somehow this has to relate to the non plan, non map, non sense challenge of linear systems I've been railing against after realising I am in fact adapting constantly to a linear process (in my practice, research, my wider life).

And pricking.....
(because I think it was Klee who said a line is the distance between two points)
(and so where's the line if we just have points?)
(and don't quote me because it could just have easily been Kandinsky or even Whitehead and I'm writing in a space miles away from my copious notes and can't remember exactly..)

So it seems fairly disjointed, tenuously linked and chaotic right now and this is the tip of the iceberg: a tiny selection from pages and pages of notes and ideas.  The temptation to focus it all using a...

linear |ˈlɪnɪə| adjective1 arranged in or extending along a straight or nearly straight line: linear movement.• consisting of or predominantly formed using lines or outlines: simple linear designs.• involving one dimension only: linear elasticity.• Mathematics able to be represented by a straight line on a graph:linear functions.• Mathematics involving or exhibiting directly proportional change in two related quantities: linear relationship.

2 progressing from one stage to another in a single series of steps; sequential: a linear narrative. 

...approach is strong.  Fear of losing the ideas, of revealing the whole experience when researching through practice (where practice for me IS me), OF GETTING LOST makes it all feel very vulnerable.

My notes on:

Murdo MacDonald: Drawing - Notes on an everyday art (2012)

I read this again and again and found that the questions I had were redundant!!!It answered a lot of what I had been pondering.

Everyday art - The working title for my proposal (concerned with challenging linear systems) is ‘Pedestrian’. I have recently discovered the word Quotidian. It is a complicated sounding word that means ‘everyday’. Drawing is not so everyday or pedestrian: a simple drawn line seems pedestrian but is extraordinarily complicated. 

As Murdo says it can be the link between us and our realities, an existential bridge, it can be duplicitous,

contrary….contentious and subversive, it can be many things. 

Is drawing concrete or even gestural? I have always assumed that, yes it’s gestural but not always concrete but now I’m confused. It’s not as simple (pedestrian) as assuming that paperless drawing*, something that I like to explore, for instance, isn’t concrete.

See Bram Arnold - Tuan YF Space and Place: the perspective of experience (Concrete Quote) ‘an object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all the senses, as well as with the active and reflective mind’

Im investigating linear systems through drawing to challenge my own working/thinking process because I’ve conditioned myself to work rationally, repetitively and without representation (of me or my subject) as a coping strategy against scatterbrain tendencies. 

Murdo observes that ‘representation/resemblance’ comes into play whether you seek it or not or even actively dispense with it. 

As to why this occurs is another dimension to my research.  However abstract, I realised my drawing transmits some reference whether it’s optically in the drawing or contributed/projected by the viewer or is tapping into a universal knowledge….Murdo is more succinct - abstraction IS drawing. 

The inversion of plane line and point illustrates how I adapted my research method/process and am now turning it around again.

From an indexical plotting - leading from point to point to create a line of thought/notion, a rational transect I designed to be able to control the results - to now trying to journey in a meandering gyroscopic sense, a bit like a Mobius strip continuously revisiting, with no beginning or end or plane or corner, something that looks like a straight line but in fact has nothing linear to it. Like an everyday labyrinth.

The text itself is an example of non-linear-ness.  Each paragraph can be read in any order. In form it reads like a list. I am using lists in Pedestrian. Lists are organised in appearance but this one is gyroscopic I think.  And each point is stand alone. Able to revisit any one in any permutation.

Student

Now I am a student again.

Orientating.  No map.  New territory.

Found the library.  Safe.

Stuff to remember piling up in my memory.

Tried to download by making lists.

There are no lines to follow.

It's crazy paving.

Some images from my induction week.

 from a wall in a life drawing room

 from a donkey in the same 

                                                                     life drawing room

 my allocated space *home*

 my wall in my allocated space *home*

The inside of my head

over the period of a year i recorded how i felt on index cards every morning

i  also made a daily drawing of my right hand

i have yet to analyse this year as data

and correlate the findings

i am presuming the marks will reveal a clue to my feelings on any given day elaborating what is written in words 

Daily Bread

each day i draw bread

tracks

a large canvas placed in my hallway for a few months
everytime i pass i wipe a pencil along it
everytime the dog passes she shakes the river dart all over it
i have begun to erase the tracks of the pencil as i make more
the family traffic disturbs more of them
i try to find them again
tracing them with another pencil

the constant search for the track or path to follow is redolent of my current existence
as i repeatedly register and re-register the lines there emerges an index of preformed routes
the research is ongoing
the findings are not conclusive
they just lead to more lines

and then the lines become words here

the niggling issues emerge as i work
i made a border of masking tape and so although this is an experimental investigative piece i still employed formalities like a clean framed boundary and a canvas support
why
i am uncomfortable about the need to use a pencil
the generation of marks should emerge directly from the family movement
it feels as though a step has been breached

Pasturised

Map of desire lines