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.