Drawing around the body the manual and visual practice of drawing and the embodiment of knowledge Juliet MacDonald

Part I Overview of the research process

The purpose of this document is to provide a critical and contextualising overview of the research project. Sections 1 to 4 contain a discussion of the background, aims, context, terminology and methodology of research. Section 5 of this document contains a narrative of the research process. This should be read in conjunction with Part II and Part III of the thesis, which are on the enclosed disc. The conclusions of the thesis are discussed in full at the end of this document in Section 6.

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Part I: Overview of the research process Contents

1

Background and aims

4

2

Research context

7

2.1

Drawing and drawing research

7

2.2

Discussions of knowledge

10

3

4

5

Terminology

12

3.1

The ‘practice’ in question

12

3.2

The ‘body’ in question

12

3.3

The ‘knowledge’ in question

12

Methodology

14

4.1

Observational drawing

14

4.2

Drawing as a reflexive process

15

4.3

Note-making

15

4.4

The reading practice

16

4.5

Dialogue

17

4.6

The writing practice

17

4.7

Iterative drawing and doodling

18

4.8

Summary of the methodology

19

Narrative of the research process

20

5.1

The still body

20

5.1.1 Life drawing

20

5.1.2 Corpses

20

5.1.3 Parts of the body

21

The moving body

21

5.2.1 Collective bodies

22

5.2.2 Other animals

23

Re-viewing the drawings

24

5.3.1 Drawing over

24

5.3.2 Combining

24

5.3.3 Animating

24

5.2

5.3

2

5.4

5.5

5.6 6

5.3.4 Re-contextualising: Eden installation

25

5.3.5 Exhibiting

25

Continuing activities

25

5.4.1 Note-making

25

5.4.2 Iterative drawings

26

5.4.3 Doodling

26

Writing

27

5.5.1 Reasons for writing

27

5.5.2 Starting points

27

5.5.3 The apparatus of drawing

28

5.5.4 Method of writing

28

5.5.5 Summary of the written outcomes

29

Further projects

30

Conclusions

32

6.1

Context

32

6.2

Summary of the project

33

6.3

Appraisal of the methodology

34

6.4

Responses to research questions

35

6.5

A history of practice

41

6.6

Conclusion

43

6.7

A few words about figures

44

Bibliography

47

Appendix A: summary of written outcomes

52

Part II: digital archive of drawings (numbered to correspond with Section 5 of this document), submitted on disc Part III: Hand Eye Practice (with integral bibliography) submitted on disc

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1

Background and aims

The research project grew out of a drawing-centred art practice. This had an enquiring aspect rather than being primarily concerned with public engagement or communication. I was finding, as I made drawings of people around me, that there was increasing uncertainty around the edges. Rather than clear circumscription of bodies, outlines were incomplete, overlapping or blurred. I began to identify within my practice, ontological questions about the status of the body: as a contained or containing unit; as an individual entity or part of a collective being; as a structure or process; as the precondition for subjectivity; as an indicator for the classification and sub-division of species or as the basic fact of animal commonality. Making drawings was a way to understand more about my own perceptual processes. It was not a matter of taking a detached external standpoint toward the subject of the body. The activity of drawing bodies, or parts of bodies particularly faces, in response to my direct visual experience of them, referred to embodied relations that I was part of, in varying degrees of proximity. I summed this up by saying that I was studying the body from the condition of being embodied, and I could not see the edges. I also found that the experience of drawing an organic object (a piece of fruit for example), initially perceived as a symbol for bodily containment, raised questions about the commonality of living processes. Drawing brought to my attention a metonymic connection between the entity being drawn, my own body and the whole category of the living, which complicated my initial understanding of the object as simply a stand-in for the body. The subject/object positions on which this initial understanding depended were also brought into question. The reflective attitude constituted by drawing had resulted in a fundamental reformulation of my understanding of this relationship. This led to an interest in the way in which a drawing practice such as mine could operate as a form of enquiry: •

I identified certain cognitive processes from my own experience. Thoughts arose while drawing which were verbal in character, experienced as part of an internal or imagined dialogue or written down as notes. These thoughts were sometimes tangential to the process (for instance, thoughts about what I was seeing) and sometimes reflective of it (a commentary on what I was doing or

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how I was doing it). This sometimes revealed uncertainties and issues for further questioning, potentially bringing about a change in my understanding. •

I found that information about my own embodied and perceptual experience was brought to the surface of the paper by the process of drawing. In addition to the verbal thinking described above, a non-verbal thought process was also constituted by the figurative operations of drawing. I conjectured that drawing makes feelings and experiences explicit. As the drawing develops, its visual manifestation informs and changes the maker in a dynamic and reflexive process.

A practice of drawing from direct perceptual experience is dependent on physical location, material engagement, animal senses and bodily action. This suggests that it could be described as embodied knowledge. However, I wished to test this assumption and examine the role of intention, positioning, habit, skill and context in determining outcomes. The research project was based on the following hypotheses: •

that drawing can be a reflexive process of thinking and learning;

•

that as a cognitive process, it can give rise to figurative, verbal and written outcomes;

•

that embodied experience is fundamental to the nature of the knowledge engendered by a manual/visual drawing practice.

In considering my drawing practice as a learning process I started from the view that the knowledge constituted by it was inevitably subjective, idiosyncratic and creative in character. A drawing practice such as mine makes explicit the particularity of experience rather than bringing about discoveries of universal truth. However, I also believed that specific, experiential insight contributes to the plurality of shared knowledge. In particular, I wished to investigate the way in which drawing could contribute to understandings of corporeality. The enquiry therefore had two levels, ontological and epistemological: at a fundamental level I wished to address questions about the nature of embodiment, using drawing as the primary method of research; and, as a reflection on that, I wished to consider the nature of drawing as knowledge. The research questions for this project are targeted at the epistemological level:

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If my practice of drawing is considered as knowledge, what characteristics does it have? How does it figure perceptual experience and contribute to an understanding of the body?

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2

Research context

2.1

Drawing and drawing research

In recent years there has been a growing research interest in drawing. The following selective review concentrates on those studies that were found to be of most relevance to this project because they concern drawing as a mode of thinking, knowledge or enquiry. Before the 1990s, the majority of research into drawing as a cognitive process concentrated on children’s drawing activities (see Thistlewood, 1992). An exception to this was Kenneth Beittel’s study of 1972. He recorded and analysed the drawings of college students in order to categorise and describe the thought processes inherent in drawing. His study compared different drawing strategies. Contextualised within the fields of education, philosophy of art, psychology and cybernetics, his research anticipates the current interest in the reflexive process of drawing, as a form of “knowing expressing” (1972, p.244). G. H. Bailey’s thesis of 1982 concerns drawing as a “movement toward meaning”. The form of knowledge constituted by drawing is “a coming to know, not a knowledge achieved prior to the on-going dialectic of the process itself” (1982, I.1.5). Although he makes reference to the drawings of five practitioners, the majority of the thesis is a general philosophical argument for drawing as a type of phenomenological reflection based on the artist’s perceptual encounter with the world. His conclusion states that drawing offers “routes for new knowing”. More recently, Derek Pigrum’s investigation of provisional modes of drawing (sketches, doodles, working drawings, notations, rough drafts) includes a discussion of drawing as knowledge. He terms these ‘transitional drawing’ and looks at their function within the context of collaborative working and learning. He concludes that these specific modes of drawing constitute “knowledge as speculative action” (2001, p.312). Whereas Bailey remarked that “We can only look at the shadows that are made on the surface of the paper and make inferences” (1982, 1.1), there are now theses available which incorporate first-person accounts of drawing practice (Saorsa, 2004, Wilson, 2005, Stackhouse, 2006). There is some overlap between my own thesis and those that have addressed perceptions of the body in drawing. Irene Leake developed a

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rapid drawing method to generate ‘schemas’ of the human body in motion (1993). More recently, Karen Wallis made a phenomenological study of the practice of drawing the nude (2003 and 2005), addressing the subject/object relations in drawing and the philosophical dimensions of life drawing. Her thesis provides a valuable example of a reflexive, practice-based approach. Patricia Cain’s recent thesis makes a thorough examination of the thinking processes in drawing: “what it is that I have come to know by drawing but could not previously make explicit to myself or others” (2008, p.2). Drawing is viewed as a form of embodied thinking, referring to Francisco Varela’s description of cognition as an active and embodied process. Her account of the cognitive process of drawing, her methodology of ‘enactive copying’, and the drawings themselves, have informed this enquiry. 6 Another practitioner whose drawings and writings concern the sense of embodiment made explicit through drawing is Sara Schneckloth (2008). Her drawings relay the viscerality of internal feelings and remember experiences through bodily gesture. By contrast, the drawings of Lucy Lyons (2008) take a pathological approach to the body by carefully delineating the structures of disease. In the last 15 years there has been a growing interest in drawing as a method of reflective enquiry. Avis Newman refers to “the current re-examination of drawing as a speculative activity…as a core medium of exploration and one closest to the operations of thought” (2007, p.21). Within higher education, conferences have addressed drawing as an inter-disciplinary activity: Drawing Across Boundaries, at Loughborough University in 1998; Drawing – The Process, at Kingston University in 2003. In 2006, a series of lectures at the National Gallery, Drawing towards Enquiry, Enquiry towards Drawing, was organised by Camberwell College of Arts. Of particular importance to my own project, was Deanna Petherbridge’s argument for the fluid and uncontained in drawing as a way of figuring the body. The same year, a symposium at Tate Britain With a Single Mark: The Models and Practice of Drawing, organised by Wimbledon School of Art, developed the philosophical discussion of drawing in terms of mark, trace and place. Catherine de Zegher’s contribution summarised the

6

Bailey, Wallis and Cain are all referred to in Part III of the thesis, Hand Eye Practice. See

Facing and The cut.

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relevance of drawing as a contemporary art practice in terms of its provisionality and indeterminacy. In addition to these events, there are ongoing initiatives. The Centre for Drawing, established at Wimbledon in 2000, has provided a forum for seminars, events, exhibitions and residencies, and now serves the whole of the University of the Arts in London. The Drawing Research Network also brings together individuals and institutions with a research interest in drawing by means of its website, email debates and symposia, such as Drawing – Responses to the Environment, 2005. The electronic journal, TRACEY, hosted by Loughborough University, provides the opportunity for this growing community of researchers to publish their work and share the outcomes of their collaborations, such as the Triptych project, which offers a “reflection on drawing practice as knowledge” (Duff et al. 2008). TRACEY’s research themes have covered the thinking, ambiguity, language, process and purpose of drawing. A number of publications have emerged from this research environment: Drawing – The Process (Duff & Davies, 2005), TRACEY’s publication, Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art (Downs et al, 2007), Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research (Garner, 2008) and Drawing – The Purpose (Duff & Sawdon, 2008). This growth in research into drawing is not restricted to the United Kingdom. Drawing Spaces, at Fábrica Braço de Prata, Lisbon, is an increasingly important centre for investigation into the theory and practice of drawing. Since its opening in September 2008, Drawing Spaces has hosted a continuous programme of events, exhibitions, residencies and academic discussions. For example, Drawing undone (2009) was an exhibition and residency in which Aileen Stackhouse and Cordelia Underhill investigated “the idea of the knowing and unknowing drawing”. The context for all of this is a renewed attention to drawing in the art world. In the United Kingdom, the exhibition The Primacy of Drawing: An artist’s view (Petherbridge, 1991) reviewed drawing as a practice extending across art historical genres. This was followed by other practitioner-selected shows: Drawing the line: Reappraising drawing past and present (Craig-Martin, 1995) and more recently, The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act (de Zegher & Newman, A., 2003) with catalogue essays and interviews which developed the philosophical discussion of drawing. In 2007, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art chose drawing as the subject of its opening exhibition (Winter, 2007). Meanwhile, the Jerwood Drawing Prize and annual exhibition has provided an ongoing opportunity for contemporary drawing practice to be debated and disseminated internationally. New galleries specialising in drawing, such

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as The Drawing Room and The Centre for Recent Drawing, have also been established (in 2003 and 2004 respectively). The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibitions Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing (1992) and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (2002-3) are seen as staging posts in the international regeneration of interest in drawing. The Drawing Center, also based in New York, has provided an expanding programme of exhibitions, events and publications. In the wider arts, education and media context, the Campaign for Drawing was launched in 2000 to “get everyone drawing” with annual Big Draw events. A major BBC series, The Secret of Drawing (2005), addressed the place of drawing in relation to the history of art, science and technology. Against this background of the celebration and promotion of drawing there is an onus on researchers to provide a detailed, critical and searching reflection into its operations, to re-think what drawing is or can be.

2.2

Discussions of knowledge

The resurgence of drawing as an art practice is summarised above. This study is primarily concerned with the status of drawing as knowledge rather than its status in relation to traditional hierarchies of art practice. However, my own practice emerges from art concerns rather than scientific ones. In order to consider the art practice of drawing as a form of enquiry I considered it within an epistemological context. Some of the Ph.D. theses mentioned above share influences with this project, for example the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Bailey, 1982) and Francisco Varela’s work on cognition and epistemology (Cain, 2008). However, this project also refers to texts that can be loosely grouped under the heading of feminist epistemology. These build on the work of pragmatism and phenomenology but address the question of who knows what, and how, as a political issue. Writers such as Lorraine Code (1991) have asked why certain cognitive endeavours are labelled ‘knowledge’ and others are not. She argues that the experiences, feelings and subjective understandings of women have not been accorded cognitive authority. Her work highlights sociological and ecological reasons for experiential and practical aspects of knowing to be acknowledged.

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Similarly, for Karen Barad there are both political and philosophical motivations for asking what counts as knowledge: “The point of challenging traditional epistemologies is not merely to welcome females, slaves, children, animals, and other dispossessed Others (exiled from the land of knowers by Aristotle more than two millennia ago) into the fold of knowers but to better account for the ontology of knowing” (2007, p.378). She challenges accounts that position the self-conscious human subject as the exclusive possessor of knowledge. Donna Haraway has argued that the achievement of collective knowledge depends on the amalgamation of many partial, specific and locatable perspectives, each offering “the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body” (2001, p.179). 7 The importance that feminist writers place on the embodied nature of knowledge and the way in which knowledge claims should be clearly situated within particular cultural and historical contexts, is useful in considering the activity of drawing. The starting point for this project is that the drawing practice in question is ‘the view from a body’ rather than the expression of an undivided and essential self. Given the contingencies of this location, drawing could constitute a form of knowledge to be shared alongside other perspectives. In questioning what constitutes knowledge, feminist writers have opened the way for cognitive processes that are inarticulate, non-verbal and non-textual to be considered productive of knowledge. This not only enables drawing to be viewed as a form of knowing, it also makes possible the expansion of the category of those who can know from humans to other animals. This research project is conducted from an ecological perspective. Rather than assuming a dichotomy between human and animal, the category of human is located within the wider category of animal and that of living thing. According to this logic, the drawings and texts included in this study are animal products as much as they are human ones. The wider contexts for this study, summarised briefly here, are discussed in more detail in the Part III of the thesis Hand Eye Practice. The section entitled The cut provides the main summary of the feminist discussions of knowledge that have informed the project.

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"I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where

partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people's lives; the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity" (Haraway, 2001, p.179).

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3

Terminology

3.1

The ‘practice’ in question

My methodology for research includes a number of practices. When ‘my practice’ is used in the singular it refers to the observational drawing practice (4.1) that constituted the central method and object of enquiry. 3.2

The ‘body’ in question

As discussed in Section 1, ontological questions concerning embodiment were integral to this study so there were no clear definitions of this term. However, in art discourse ‘the body’ is often taken to mean the human body, I wished to expand this to the animal body. Although, taxonomic distinctions were not avoided completely (see 5.2.2), there was an attempt to ensure the inclusion of other species within the consideration of corporeality. 3.2

The ‘knowledge’ in question

As I began to articulate my research topic in terms of ‘knowledge’ it was particularly important to consider what knowledge might be in the context of my study. This is an issue for art practice as research in general: “The arts need to discover and invent their own concept of knowledge, on their own terms, and in relation to their own practices, taking great care in crafting the problem, not because the problem is more important than the solution, but because…the solution is set up in the way the problem is stated, the problem gets the solution it deserves” (Reilly, 2002). Knowledge is often referred to metaphorically: new terrain to be explored, fields to be marked out, foundations to be built on, gaps to be filled. I found these metaphors problematic in suggesting a kind of colonial advancement into the unknown or the construction of complete and solid edifices. Influenced by the work of Maturana and Varela, who describe cognition as the way in which the organism “brings forth a world” (Maturana and Varela, 1987), I defined ‘knowing’ for the purposes of the study: every living thing makes of itself a world of understanding, an understanding of the world, integral to the physical being, constantly forming and reforming in response to the relationships and the environment of which it is a part.

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In this description, the chiasmic structure of the phrase “a world of understanding, an understanding of the world” was perhaps more important than the words themselves. The folding over of this statement reflected the inter-subjectivity of knowing.8 Such a definition seemed to collapse the separation between knowing and being/becoming. It blurred the distinction between the ontological and the epistemological enquiry. Drawing, by ‘bringing forth a world’ would change me. These changes would be manifested in skills, perceptions, felt understandings, ways of doing and ways of seeing. The history of drawing would leave its cognitive traces “much like paths that exist only as they are laid down in walking” (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991, p.205). 9 However, the ‘I’ at the centre of the enquiry could not be considered a contained, unitary and unchanging ‘self’ but should be understood as a part of many relationships, entangled in its specific cultural, evolutionary and physical context. Rather than taking a detached and externalised stance toward the topic of drawing or the subject of the body, I would be immersed in the enactment of these modes of being and knowing. I described the immersive positioning I was taking in relation to the research topic as the intention to stay inside the body of the question. The above definition of ‘knowing’ was not intended to exclude others. I wanted to leave open the possibility of ‘knowledge’ as a noun10 – as something embodied by the artefacts of the drawing process, or by the mobile instantiations of drawings once they were scanned and digitally disseminated. In the later stages of the research I have defined the process of figuration in drawing as being productive of knowledge. The figures produced may be meaningful only to the person who has drawn them but still contribute to the learning/knowing/remaking process described above.

8

At the time I had a very limited awareness of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of reciprocity and

the chiasm (1968, pp.130-55), but the relevance of this grew over the course of the project. 9

See Cain, 2008, for a discussion of drawing in relation to Varela’s theory of ‘enactive

cognition’. 10

The idea that a collection of drawings could form a repository of knowledge was influenced

by looking at pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks (for example at the Victoria & Albert Museum, 2006) and seeing the Joseph Bueys exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (1999), which presented his “Secret Block” of drawings as a kind of codex that informed the rest of his work.

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4

Methodology

4.1

Observational drawing

The research methodology was centred on the practice of drawing in response to immediate visual experience. Beyond the overall concern with the body, there was initially no stated rationale regarding decisions about what to draw. At first, not only bodies were drawn, but also other organic objects perceived as having some metonymic connection with the body, for example an apple, being a contained form that can be held in the hand. As the research became more focused, the observational drawing practice was limited to drawings of the bodies of others (humans or other animals) or parts of my own body that could be viewed without mirrors, such as my hands. Beyond this, the choice of subject matter was made according to circumstance and subjective significance. Bailey points out that all perceptual experience is “an active search for meaning” (1982, V.5.1) in which significance is determined idiosyncratically. This does not mean it is illogical or incoherent but rather it follows a logic of embodied subjectivity. Drawing constitutes a move “from the contingency of our day-to-day perception” toward “a fresh direction of possibility and meaning” (1982, II.2.4). The characteristics of this observational drawing practice were as follows: •

Drawings were made by hand, on paper, using pencils, erasers, ball-point pens and occasionally brushes.

•

Drawings were made as a response to immediate visual experience, unmediated by mirrors, cameras or other devices.

•

This response was figurative: there was a clear figure/ground structure to the drawings and the figure produced was related to the perceptual experience.

•

The environment or ‘background’ was not drawn, only the perceived embodied entity.

•

There was a concern for the specificity of the experience.

•

There was an awareness of the process of drawing, which was open-ended in the sense that it was not primarily guided by aesthetic intentions.

These drawings are discussed in more detail in sections 5.1 and 5.2. They can be viewed in the digital archive of drawings, Part II, sections 5.1 and 5.2 (on disc).

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4.2

Drawing as a reflexive process

‘Reflexivity’ as it is used here is based on Dewey’s description of the way in which experience becomes meaningful: when an impulsion to do something meets with a resistance that deflects it, forward action is converted into “re-flection” (1958, p.60). This turning of an impulse back upon itself ‘clothes’ every experience with meaning. The experience is returned to the individual, “charged with a fresh significance arising from the interchange” (Bailey, 1982, II.2.2). For Bailey, the drawing process is constantly informed by this turning: “the draughtsman…is acting in respect of the drawing as his action is being shaped by the drawing” (1982, II.3.3). Through the material displacements of drawing, sensory experiences are given shape and made available for recall, and so we “come to know our sensing” (1982, II.3.3). In other words, drawing is an inherently reflexive process. However, this description implies a personal, private or individual process of “coming to know” (Bailey, 1982, I.1.5) that would not necessarily be apparent from its artefacts. In order to make the knowledge-making process of drawing more explicit, and in order to contextualise it in relation to other drawing and knowledge practices, it was necessary to situate the central drawing practice within a wider practical methodology.

4.3 Note-making The reflexive aspects of the drawing process were a starting point for the practice of note-making. Thoughts that arose while drawing were noted down. Just as drawing could be interpreted as a means to ‘capture’ or fix transient experience, notes were a means to hold on to thoughts before they slipped away. Observational drawings were reviewed retrospectively and issues or question that led on from them were developed further through note-making and diagrams. The hand-written word in this context was regarded as “a modality of drawing” (Ingold, 2007, p.147). Whereas the observational drawings were normally made on plain paper, the note-making practice used A4 file paper, pre-printed with a 5mm grid. By contrast to the formality of the grid, the diagrams and notes produced were informal and idiosyncratic. Coloured felt-tip pens were used to provide different levels or categories of notation. As the project continued, the note-making activities became increasingly important and more integrated with other drawing activities.

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The note-making practice is discussed further in section 5.4.1, and shown in the corresponding section of Part II (on disc).

4.4

The reading practice

Library and internet-based research was the primary means of encountering other perspectives, providing ‘deflection’ and ‘re-flection’, in Dewey’s terms. Within the methodology, text-based research has been treated as a reflexive, practical interaction, on similar terms to drawing. Reading was activated by the practice of taking notes. Sometimes sections of text were copied out by hand so that the words could be re-read as they were reinscribed. Related or tangential comments were added. Sometimes these notes included drawings, either copied from books or made in response to circumstances around me as I read. The reading practice was thereby integrated into the drawing practice. In the later stages of the project, when a closer reading of texts was necessary, pages were photocopied, annotated and drawn over using different colours for different levels or stages of comment. Some of the textual research followed normal academic procedure (for example, searching for thesis titles containing the word ‘drawing’ or following citations from one book to another). However, there were also incidental encounters, such as noticing the title of a book on a library shelf. Sometimes internet searches were conducted on subjects that seemed tangential to the project. The elements of contingency (what was on the library shelves) and of felt significance (what seemed relevant and interesting) were at times prioritised over rationalised procedure (what I should read, what I could articulate a reason for reading). Beittel, referring to the work of David Berlyne, discusses the “diversive exploration” strategies involved in art process; exploratory behaviour is guided by the stimulus of “novelty, surprisingness, complexity, ambiguity, incongruity, puzzlingness, and the like” (Beittel, 1972, p.42). New experience is then collated with contrasting experience. Conflicts, tensions and ambiguities are not only tolerated within art processes, they provide its impetus (1972, p.43). Using such ‘diversive’ strategies to guide a reading practice is more likely to produce outcomes that are not predictive. Taking a “wayfaring” approach (Ingold, 2007) to this study resulted in encounters with other disciplines along the way and avoided the limitation of remaining within one self16

referencing discourse. Many of the tangential routes of this reading practice were traceable to the drawing and note-making activities, and ended up returning to them. I would argue that these were not irrelevant deviations but rather, that when I was in the mode of doing that this research programme constituted, I operated according to its logic, although this was easier to appreciate retrospectively than at the time.

4.5

Dialogue

Direct dialogue was also important as a means of incorporating different perspectives. This included: •

attending conferences;

•

discussions with research supervisors;

•

presentations given to other students and educators and the discussions and feedback that resulted;

•

4.6

email discussions with other researchers.

The writing practice

As the example of note-making suggests, there was a movement toward writing constituted by the research methodology. In his essay on The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing, Michael Newman suggests that there is no absolute division between the mark as it appears in drawings and the written word. Drawing “enacts a becoming. The mark becomes line, contour, hatching, sign, and writing”. There can be a movement toward signification within the drawing process, “a continuum of sense, from one sense of ‘sense’ to the other”, but he makes the point that this direction is always reversible (2003, p.100). In the case of this methodology, the “continuum” is represented by: •

the immediate, figurative and sometimes confused marks made in response to sensory experience;

•

the hand-written scrawl of reflective comments;

•

diagrams and other forms of tangential thinking in note form;

•

notes from or on texts;

•

reflective thoughts/feelings that were typed; 17

•

other writing which addressed the wider context of the practice, and became Part III of the thesis, Hand Eye Practice;

•

formal reports, including this one, which make the research aims and processes more explicit.

The writing practices listed above (with the exception of the last example) were openended, i.e. not proceeding with a clear direction or argument. In a sense, the operations of drawing were enacted metaphorically within the writing process; it was a non-linear progression of loops and tangents, producing a pattern of crossreferences. This movement toward articulation constitutes one way in which an expanded drawing practice can produce ‘knowledge’ in the form of written descriptions and narratives which, together with ‘knowledge’ in the form of drawings, can be disseminated and shared in an academic context.

4.7

Iterative drawing and doodling

Various strategies that contrasted with the observational drawing approach were tried out, for example, drawing with eyes closed. Two practices in particular were maintained: iterative drawing and doodling. The iterative drawings were figurative in the sense that they involved the repeated tracing of a double loop (a figure of 8) with a continuous line, also referring to the figure of the chiasmus or the infinity symbol. These primarily had a bodily reference: the movement of the hand within the boundaries of the paper, as a rhythmical and meditative activity. Doodling activated a mode of thinking Beittel refers to as “autistic” (the type experienced in day-dreaming and free association) which, he suggests, paradoxically operates alongside “directed” thinking in drawing (1972, p.44). Whereas in the conventional practices he studied these paradoxes are somehow resolved, doodling allows them to be maintained. Conflicts were enacted in this activity. As soon as rules were made they were then broken – as soon as a tendency to use line-as-boundary emerged, I felt a conflicting desire to transgress these boundaries. The doodling practice was complementary to the conventionalised practice of observational drawing because of its subversive tendencies. These drawings are discussed further in sections 5.4.2 and 5.4.3 and shown in the corresponding section in Part II (on disc). 18

4.8

Summary of the methodology

In summary, this was an integrated and practical methodology. The positioning of the researcher in relation to the project was immersive. Considerations of subjective interest and significance provided direction in relation to drawing and textual research, but the subjectivity of the researcher was regarded as being partly constituted by the research process itself. There was a tolerance of contradiction, uncertainty and paradox within the process. However, coherent themes that emerged became significant in informing its ongoing progress. Drawing and writing practices were openended rather than projective. There was a movement toward written outcomes and explanation, but there was a concurrent development of inarticulate feeling, thinking and doing.

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5

Narrative of the research process

The drawings referred to in this section are shown in the digital archive of drawings, Part II of the thesis (supplied on disc). The numbering of Part II corresponds to the numbering of the text below and it is intended that Part II should be viewed alongside this text. 5.1

The still body

5.1.1 Life drawing Initially, drawing took place in circumstances that enabled slow, careful drawing, for example, life drawing situations in which the person being drawn remains still. The exercise of care was apparent not only in the conduct of the drawing but also in the feelings that arose – the face, being of greatest emotional significance, was the part most carefully drawn. However, this was also an exercise in control: perception of a single body being structured by means of visual judgements and dexterous actions. The conventions of this activity were considered: the practice of outlining, measuring and comparing; the equipment of easels and drapes; the role of passive model or active performer; 11 the level of accountability and negotiation between the person drawing and the person drawn; the significance of clothing and nakedness in the relationships being enacted. 12 Life drawing provided the opportunity to experiment with the practice: the skills involved in right-handed drawings were contrasted with the uncertainty of drawings made with the left hand and drawings made without looking at the paper; the movement of the eye between model and paper was speeded up to close the gap between perception of the face and perception of the drawing. 5.1.2 Corpses The bodies of dead birds and mice were also drawn. The comparative stillness of the dead body enabled a close inspection over a period of time. This proximity produced an experience of overwhelming detail. There was a tension in the drawing process between the distancing generalisations necessary to produce a recognisable figure and the conflicting tendency to become lost in the complex environment of the body.

11

When the model is also an artist this can disrupt the conventional dynamics of life drawing:

for example Nina Kane’s Cast-off Drama initiative and events (2004). 12

See Karen Wallis’s thesis for a much fuller examination of the philosophical implications of

the conventions of life drawing (2003). This thesis is discussed in the section of Hand Eye Practice entitled Facing.

20

The interference of other senses (for example, smell), despite having a repellent effect, worked against a position of detachment. 5.1.3 Parts of the body Drawings were made of hands: my own and those of others. Some of these were published as an interactive contribution to TRACEY (MacDonald, 2004). The hand was perceived as significant: as the body part that guided the drawing tool, the locus of human manipulative ability and also of touch. The palm of my left hand provided a particularly complex and intimate record of personal history. In drawing this, I was again aware of a conflict between a habitual, skilled way of drawing in which the recording of detail is subsidiary to overall shape and tonal values, and a more immersive approach in which there is an attempt to follow every detail even if this leads to a confusion of relationships and a failure to make sense. The former mode of drawing depends on the eyes being periodically unfocussed to visually flatten the object and deliver a simultaneous perception of a whole. The latter results from a travelling focus on successive points as though encountering a landscape through which there are any number of possible routes. In all the drawing situations described above the determination of stillness is only a relative one, the subtle shifts in palm skin or the rigor mortis of the corpse are signs of constant change. What these circumstances had in common was that bodies were arranged for the purposes of drawing. A number of issues became apparent from these drawings: the embodiment of the practice in manual and visual skills and habits of doing; the role of senses other than vision; the arrangement of bodies and the controlled space between the drawer and the drawn. Leading from this, I began to question the way in which positions of subject and object were being constituted by the practice. In some respects it seemed as though my own hand became an object to me once I started observing and drawing it, but paradoxically I felt that the things I drew left an impression on me. I was not detached from the experience or unchanged by it.

5.2

The moving body

In order to investigate the possibilities of drawing as a form of knowledge I decided to undermine some of the skills and conventions of my existing practice and aim for a phenomenological approach to drawing: starting from scratch based on directly experienced phenomena, “re-learning to look at the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 21

p.xx). To do this, drawings were conducted in locations where the visibility, position and movement of bodies would be a matter of contingency rather than arrangement, making a habitual or skilled response more difficult. I had found from previous experience that drawing in a public place made me more aware of my own visibility and my own bodily situation in relation to those around me. 5.2.1 Collective bodies A planned and structured drawing project involved making a series of 64 drawings in 4 locations in Leeds. These were public places through which many people passed: the bus station, train station, market and a shopping area. In most of these locations I was positioned within the crowd, as part of it (with the exception of the market drawings, which were made from above). Drawings were conducted over a period of half an hour, using ball-point pen on tracing paper. These tools restricted the drawing to line and prohibited erasure, so that drawing was a purely additive process. Beyond this there were no other rules – a line could follow a perceived trajectory, an outline or the direction of a glance. The individual bodies on their divergent courses were drawn into a collective figure – the crowd – not as an accurate mapping exercise but as a process of improvisation in which a number of strategies were tried. A comparison with video footage taken over the same period in the same locations showed the difference between the camera’s apparently passive, indiscriminate collection of data from its visual field, and the selective, creative attempt to make sense constituted by drawing. The way in which 30 minutes of experience and action was channelled into one drawing, congealing as one figure, raised questions about the re-working of time and space in drawing. Bailey devotes a whole chapter to the paradoxical way in which time is spatialised and space is unfolded over time in drawing (Bailey, 1982, IV). This is apparent in the action of drawing a line: the visual experience of space is followed and marked by a movement of eye and hand; the result of this durational act is an attribute of spatial extension, the trace. However, the drawings conducted in these locations did not begin from the perception of static spatial values but from perception of the moving body. This is experienced as a cohesive whole, not as a collection of separable temporal and spatial properties. In the process of drawing, tension arose from the effort to make a separation, to fix an outline in one position, or alternatively to track a movement. The completeness of the perceptual experience – the integration of temporality and spatiality – could not be recorded by means of drawing. Drawing was a selective process of following complex sensory experience: hesitant linear fixtures were made on the basis of slippery and uncertain memories of this extended experience. The drawings fail to ‘capture’ expressions, faces, bodies and relationships between bodies, as I saw them, advancing toward me or receding from 22

view, wrapped in their clothing and partially concealed by the objects and bodies around them. Instead they record the struggle to do so and the difficulty of making any kind of grasp on fleeting perceptual experience. 5.2.2 Other animals In addition to crowds of people, other animals were drawn: in particular bees, crows and cattle. These presented similar conflicts: the attempt to record the particularity of the body was thwarted by sudden and rapid movement and drawing became instead a tracking exercise. The attempt to follow movement was always a matter of falling behind. Although these animals were drawn in their normal environment, the activity of drawing constituted an intervention; the proximity of a human body produced deflections. Crows flew away if I approached, so they were always drawn from a position that was too far away for any kind of detailed perception, hidden by leaves, grass or moving in flight. By comparison, drawings of cattle were rendered more difficult because of their proximity as they came toward me. The contingencies of drawing from a position that was too close or too far away not only undermined a skilled or habitual practice, but also raised questions about the relationships being enacted in the process of drawing. The position of being within sight of another animal, in the same space, constituted a connection. However, the perceived avoidance strategies of the crows or bees presented an unfathomable alterity. By contrast, there was a face-to-face encounter with the cattle and the impression of eye contact. Drawing provided a means of confronting and considering degrees of otherness and difference. The fact that groups of drawings were directed toward particular species pre-supposes taxonomic distinctions. 13 In retrospect, it would have been useful not to apply pre-set criteria, and to draw whatever mammal, bird, insect or human was in sight at a particular time. I began to see the drawings as the product of a set of interrelated factors: •

the conventional practice of drawing (made difficult by circumstances but still enacted according to established procedures of marks on paper);

•

the historical, educational and cultural context of this practice;

•

the subjective decisions and selections made by the person drawing, informed by these contexts;

13

Kiki Smith’s drawings, translated into prints, break down some of these species divisions by

applying the same treatment to humans as to other animals, for example the lithograph Ginzer and the Birds, 1996.

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•

the physical positioning and interactions of drawer and drawn, as active subjects;

•

the environmental and cultural context within which interactions between persons, or between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’, take place;

•

the physical properties of pencil and paper and the displacements and rearrangements of these materials through the drawing process.

5.3

Re-viewing the drawings

Rather than applying methods of interpretation or analysis to the drawings produced, I considered it more in keeping with the practical nature of the methodology to develop their meanings using creative strategies. 5.3.1 Drawing over In one sketchbook, drawings were made over other drawings, partially obscuring them. These incorporated all the categories of drawing mentioned above, overlaying each other: drawings of dead mice, drawings of people in public places, life drawings, drawings of birds, sheep, fish, family members and my own hands, doodles and drawings made with eyes closed. This was a means of re-thinking the categorisations that had operated within the project up to that point. It also provided a way of reconsidering the drawings as they were being worked over. 5.3.2 Combining Another method involved scanning individual drawings and then compositing, layering and arranging them together into a single image using graphics software. This was nondestructive, as the original artefact remained unchanged, but it became a compositional exercise, removed from the direct material displacements of drawing. 5.3.3 Animating Scans of drawings were also grouped into sequences. This provided an opportunity for review as dissolves and morphs were applied from one drawing to the next. The 64 drawings made in Leeds were animated as moving image sequences, the drawings from one location becoming a single mutating figure, stretching and contorting between different states, which introduced a different kind of temporality and movement to that experienced in the original drawings.

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Although new meanings were constructed by means of these digital strategies, the process of computer manipulation was a move away from the immediate, bodily engagement constituted by the practice of drawing. 5.3.4 Re-contextualising: Eden installation An alternative strategy was to use a physical space to re-combine the drawings. A studio space was the site for an installation based around the figure/narrative of the Garden of Eden. This provided a starting point from which lines of enquiry could be drawn out concerning the body, its origins, human/animal distinctions and figures of knowledge. This was an opportunity to refer to some of the philosophical and political contexts of the research project (see section 2.2 above). Archaeological attempts to locate Eden in the Persian Gulf provided a further political dimension, linked to the fluids of oil, water and blood. Drawings and notes from the research process were displayed around this space alongside other images, texts, objects and video projection. As a means of drawing all these together, lines of connection were made using string, wool and wire. Reflective comments were also written onto the walls. The room was photographed and a selection of keywords was used to tag and organise the photographs as the final state of the project. I found that by extending the drawing space into a three-dimensional area I could be physically inside the drawing and use it as a method of thinking through a complex cultural narrative in relation to my own body of drawings. As an installation, however, the references were too divergent to form a coherent or communicative whole. 5.3.5 Exhibiting A formal exhibition of drawings was organised as an opportunity for review and dialogue about the research programme (MacDonald, 2007). Drawings were regrouped and displayed together, either on the walls or on screen as image sequences. Reflective pieces of text were written to accompany each group of drawings and a presentation was given, providing the opportunity for discussion with other students and educators. Seeing all the drawings together in one space enabled cross-references and comparisons.

5.4

Continuing activities

5.4.1 Note-making Alongside the developments outlined above, the activities of reading and note-making continued, as described in the methodology section (see 4.3 above). Notes became 25

increasingly integrated with drawings from observation. Toward the end of the project, pen and gridded paper (rather than pencil and cartridge paper) were increasingly used for all types of drawing. This meant the loss of tonal qualities and erasure in favour of linearity. This pared-down practice enabled the lines of drawings and the lines of hand-written notes to become more closely integrated, as there was an increasing movement toward the written word. 5.4.2 Iterative drawings The drawings of a continuous double loop, using ball-point pen on tracing paper, were repeated periodically. A video was made showing the rhythmic and meditative aspects of this process: the arm moves repetitively within the bounded space of the paper producing a trace that refers only to the inscribing body. 14 This figure became increasingly associated with Merleau-Ponty’s essay, The Intertwining – The Chiasm (1968, p.130-155), discussed in Hand Eye Practice, in the section entitled The knot. 15 Interpreted in my drawings as a double loop (a figure of eight or infinite symbol), the path is one that can be continuously re-traced. Similar structures are found in the drawings of other practitioners whose concerns are with the body and its temporality. For example, Sara Schneckloth’s twisted, cellular forms and vessels are descriptions of somatic experience (2008, p.285). Antony Gormley’s Clearing 57 and 60 (2007) are entwined, re-iterated loops that also have a sense of three-dimensionality. He describes the act of drawing as a means of “tracing time … being at the ever-present point of time that leaves a line” (2008, p.12). 5.4.3 Doodling The activity of doodling (also discussed in 4.7) became increasingly elaborate. These drawings, which I perceived to be embarrassingly naïve, seemed to provide a counter to the more literate and academic practices. A couple of phrases provided a

14

The video and drawings were shown as part of the Drawn Over exhibition held at Alsager

Arts Centre (2007). 15

Merleau-Ponty seeks to describe the double aspect of embodiment: “If one wants

metaphors, it would be better to say that the body sensed and the body sentient are … as the two segments of one sole circular course which goes above from left to right and below from right to left, but which is but one sole movement in its two phases” (1968, p.138). The “Chiasm” suggests that this circular movement has a twist or crossover, at which point inside becomes outside and outside becomes inside, though these aspects are always returning to each other.

26

retrospective explanation for the doodles: Derrida’s call for a “fabulous and chimerical” thinking (2002, p.416) and Code’s reference to “the kaleidoscopic and dazzling” aspects of sensory experience (1991, p.50). I was attempting to develop a more kaleidoscopic and chimerical way of thinking.

5.5

Writing

5.5.1 The reasons for writing In the later stages of the research programme there was an intensification of library and internet-based research. This led to the twelve inter-connected texts that form Part III of the thesis, Hand Eye Practice. Because the methodology was drawing led, there had been no historical survey conducted at the beginning of the research programme. Instead, questions about the academic and artistic traditions that informed my practice arose through doing it and were addressed retrospectively through textual research. I questioned the role of manual skill and the modes of vision that came into operation when I started drawing. At times, the act of drawing did constitute a mode of looking that had a distancing and objectifying effect, but paradoxically I also found drawing to be a channel for feelings of empathy and respectful concern. I felt that I had gone as far as I could in addressing this paradox through the activity of drawing itself and I needed to understand it in a historical context by consulting other sources of information. I had a sense that the history of humanist knowledge was profoundly embedded in the practice of drawing that I had inherited, and I wanted to understand this better. 5.5.2 The starting point Apart from diagrams and lists, there was no planned direction for reading or writing. The report of the Writing Purposefully in Art and Design network quotes Donald Schön: “the experience of the students in any reflective practicum is that they must plunge into the doing, and try to educate themselves before they know what it is they’re trying to learn” (Schön, 1987). In effect, this research/writing process was a matter of setting out a selection of evidence and trying to make sense of it. The process began by making lists and diagrams of all the issues and concerns that had been raised in the drawing process but remained unresolved (see Part II, 5.5). The hand and the eye provided a basic structure around which to cluster the various pieces of writing. Drawing is often summarised as being an activity of hand, eye and

27

mind,16 the rest of the body being commonly left out of the description. My opinion at the beginning of the research programme was that drawing was necessarily a whole body engagement. However, this had been challenged by an increased awareness of the possibility that manual and visual skills could override other sensory experience if the intention to make a skilled drawing was the paramount concern. Having attempted to destabilise the inherited patterns of my practice (see 5.2 above) and take a phenomenological approach to drawing, I found that so long as I was holding the drawing tool in the usual way and focussing my eyes in such a way as to flatten and fix the objects of perception, I was to some extent continuing a tradition. Not only did the hand and eye feature metonymically in the characterisation of drawing, it seemed they constituted values in its operation. 5.5.3 The apparatus of drawing Influenced by Foucault, Karen Barad uses the term ‘apparatus’ to include not only the equipment and devices employed in knowledge projects but also the set of discourses, material arrangements, institutions and subjectivities that contribute to their production and use (Barad, 2007, p.63 and pp.199-201). Considered in this way, the apparatus of drawing is a dynamic process, a coming together of material configurations, discursive practices, bodies and tools. If the body of the practitioner is considered as a unitary entity, then manual and visual practices are integral to the whole mode of being of the embodied subject. However, if the body of the practitioner is considered as part of a wider apparatus of drawing, the hand and eyes take on additional values as the nexus of a pre-established mode of doing. In the first case, they are integral parts of the body’s sensory, motor and cognitive systems; in the second case, they are also the instruments of a habitual grip and focus that are tied to the history of artistic and academic systems of practice. 5.5.4 The method of writing The history of drawing and the discourse concerning it, in Western Europe, was considered in relation to discussions of knowledge and ontology. Sources from a range of disciplines were consulted: philosophy, feminist epistemology, art history, psychology and anthropology. Ecological considerations were brought into this, as was the perceived dichotomy between human and animal. There are a number of

16

Rousseau advocated drawing as a method of developing the “exactness of eye and flexibility

of hand”; Sheila Paine cites this as one of the earliest references to drawing as a means of advancing mental acuity (Rousseau, 1792, quoted in Paine, 1992, p.5). The section of Hand Eye Practice entitled The academy gives examples of a similar rhetoric, used from the time of the Renaissance.

28

references to animals throughout the texts; however, the intention was not to use these metaphorically to stand for human concerns, but rather as “indices” (Tyler, 2004, pp.31-44), or pointers toward the question of animality. Drawing, in this textual study, was viewed as a constellation of diverse practices, the development of which preceded the divergence of art and science in the modern era. Rather than a comprehensive survey this was more of an idiosyncratic sampling process. I was looking for the coincidence of references to the manual and visual in relation to drawing and to epistemology. My intention was to try to build up a picture of the way in which drawing fitted into discussions of knowledge. Various stories of origins also came to the fore: the creation story of Genesis, histories of human evolution and references to the origins of drawing in cave art. The process was one of selective unpicking and reconnecting. A number of separate texts were written. These contained overlaps and cross-references to each other. Some were ambiguous and apparently contradictory in their arguments. Some were later abandoned. In many respects this process was analogous to drawing, in that the cross-references between and within texts were as important as the linear development of their arguments. The abandonment of some texts to be replaced by others could be seen as enacting a form of erasure. Overall, this historical investigation could be described as a process of knotting together, rather than unravelling. The texts were converted to html so that cross-references could be made explicit. Hyperlinks were added between texts, and to digitised drawings, in order to constitute one complex structure. The simple diagram on the opening page was generated as an index to the inter-textual body or drawing behind it. The structure is not closed; there are links to external websites, even though these may not remain live. Not restricted to paper, or even the bounded space of a room (see 5.3.4 above), this divergent structure is fully activated in the expansive context of the Internet.17 5.5.5 Written outcomes In retrospect I would interpret the process of writing Part III, Hand Eye Practice as being an attempt to build up a picture of how the discourse of drawing can be mapped onto that of knowledge. The hand and the eye, as tropes that feature in both discussions, were a useful starting point. The twelve texts that comprise Hand Eye Practice are as follows: The human hand 17

It is presented here on disc but the intention is to make it available on-line in the future.

29

The distinguishing mark The fall The artisan The academy The cut The disembodied eye The knot The artist’s hand Touching the ground Alpha Facing (the twelve texts share a bibliography). The twelve texts do not have to be read in this order. The texts are summarised in Appendix A and this also suggests an alternative way of grouping them by theme.

5.6

Further projects

A project entitled De-skill Re-skill was conducted as a residency at Drawing Spaces in Lisbon (MacDonald, 2008). This involved a further deconstruction of my practice of observational drawing. Taking the configuration of manual, visual and tool-using skills in my practice, I broke this down systematically by removing each of these three elements in turn: holding the pencil between my toes; shutting my eyes and drawing in response to tactile sensations; and drawing by rubbing charcoal powder directly onto the paper with my fingers. After that, I removed two elements at a time: holding the pencil between my toes with eyes shut; applying the charcoal powder directly, with my eyes shut; and having my eyes open but applying charcoal powder with my toes. In each case I was attempting to make a figurative response to the thing I was drawing: my left hand. Having my eyes shut made the greatest difference to this. Instead of responding to visual sensation, I was responding to the feelings in my left hand. These were most perceptible where the fingers folded over on themselves. Subtle shifts in position produced the subject/object alternation described by Merleau-Ponty (1962, p.93). By comparison, with my eyes open, there was relatively little awareness of the tactile sensations of my left hand as I drew it.

30

The zero point of the de-skilling exercise was to shut my eyes and walk across the paper. 18 This too could be considered a figurative process, producing a recognisable footprint. After reaching this point the elements of my skilled practice were systematically reintroduced. I found that even when I was drawing in a skilled way I did not feel I had complete control or mastery of the drawing. There were constant erasures and re-adjustments and the outcomes were never satisfactory in terms of looking ‘right’. This led me to a greater awareness of the unfinishable nature of drawing. Like all knowledge, it is only ever provisional.

18

This de-skilling was a re-enactment of some of the strategies used by artists of the 1960s

and 70s. These are referred to in Part III, Hand Eye Practice for example: Richard Long’s A Line made by walking, 1967, is included in The distinguishing mark; Richard Morris’s Blind Time, 1973, is discussed in Touching; and The artist’s hand cites William Anastasi’s Unsighted Drawings, 1968, and Janine Antoni’s Loving Care, 1993. Rebecca Horn’s Pencil Mask, 1972, (shown in Bodylandscapes, Hayward Gallery, 2005) was also a rejection of manual control.

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6

Conclusions

6.1

Context

In the early stages of the study I attempted to take a phenomenological approach to the practice of observational drawing. By this I meant having no pre-conceived vision of how each drawing would look, and responding quickly and directly to my perceptual experience (see 5.2). I hoped this would allow my own immediate experience to determine outcomes rather than these drawings being subject to a set of received modes, aspirations, styles and aesthetic values. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms it would be a means of “re-learning to look at the world” (1962, p.xx). I wished to consider drawing as constituting specific, situated knowledge – an example of “the view from a body” (Haraway, 2001, p.179). Could drawing be a reflection on individual embodied experience in relation to immediate social/material context, rather than being pre-determined by any particular aesthetic intention? As the project developed I became more aware of the difficulty of seeing the world afresh, or of locating individual, embodied experience. As Haraway emphasises and Vicki Kirby reiterates: “Even a particular point of view is never a simple unity: it is always and necessarily different from itself, dislocating and displacing the very property of one point of view” (Kirby, 1997, p.161). I also became more aware of the difficulty of stepping outside the paradigm of artistic discourses that had shaped my own practice, while still using the same set of skills, materials and general methods. On the one hand, there is a view of observational drawing as objective record. In this positivist version of drawing-as-knowing, the aim is to draw marks that accurately correspond to the visible world, and to avoid the variability of corporeal, stereoscopic vision. On the other hand, there is a Modernist interpretation of observational drawing as the scene for expression of the Self. Here, an emphasis on the undivided interiority of the artist, projected outward into marks, runs counter to a sense of enquiry. Both rely on a split between subject and object that I wished to re-evaluate by considering the inter-subjectivity of drawing and its potential as knowledge-making.19

19

For discussion of the subject/object split see Hand Eye Practice, particularly The cut.

Dewey (1958) uses the term ‘expression’ in an alternative way that disrupts the two views of drawing characterised here.

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Much of the project was therefore concerned with attempts to disrupt my existing skills and methods in order to examine them and work out whether the basic premise of drawing from visual experience could still have relevance in a different paradigm – one in which the primacy of the human subject, metaphysical conceptions of mind and self, and representationalist concepts of knowledge are all contested. 20 Under these circumstances, the knowledge claims of art practice as enquiry or art practice as research rest on such factors as concern for specificity, involvement with materials and use of reflexive, creative methods to study phenomena from within. Art practice in general has the potential to describe and intervene in relationships; to contest and examine subjectivities; and to assert the subversive presence of the practitioner’s animal body in cognitive endeavours. As research method it mixes up issues of knowing and being, disrupting boundaries between epistemology and ontology. But how could observational drawing, a practice embedded in centuries of humanist tradition, contribute to this emerging, undisciplined discipline? Although there were compelling reasons to dismiss observational drawing out of hand, this study was motivated by the feeling that the simplistic characterisation presented above (of objective/expressive functions) does not do justice to either past or future practices. I conclude that the practice of drawing from visual experience,21 despite its inherited values, nonetheless provides space for unplanned surfacings and happenings that allow bodily experience and relationships to be figured and re-figured.

6.2

Summary of the project

The research project was based on the following hypotheses: •

that drawing can be a reflexive process of thinking and learning;

•

that as a cognitive process, it can give rise to figurative, verbal and written outcomes;

20

Karen Barad describes representationalism as “the idea that representations and the objects

(subjects, events or states of affairs) they purport to represent are independent of one another” (2007, p.28). 21

The terms used to describe this, ‘observational drawing’ or ‘drawing from life’, are discussed

below.

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•

that embodied experience is fundamental to the nature of the knowledge engendered by a manual/visual drawing practice.

These hypotheses were based on the research of others (Beittel, Pigrum, Bailey, Cain) summarised in 2.1, and on my own practical experience. The research questions were framed to test the last of these, concerning the status of drawing as embodied knowledge: If my practice of drawing is considered as knowledge, what characteristics does it have? How does it figure perceptual experience and contribute to an understanding of the body? The questions have been addressed using a creative, practical methodology (summarised in Section 4), the conduct of which bears out the first two hypotheses. Reflective, verbal commentary that arose whilst drawing was recorded by means of note-making and the conduct of the methodology was adapted in response (see 5.2 for example). Figurative content was re-worked as drawings were scanned, combined, digitally animated, re-contextualised and drawn over (see 5.3). The historical and epistemological context of my practice was further examined by means of reading and writing, and an inter-textual diagram/website was produced (see 5.5). The figurative outcomes of this thinking process are shown in the digital archive of drawings (Part II of the thesis). The written outcomes are also in digital form as an interconnected website/diagram of twelve texts (Part III of the thesis, Hand Eye Practice). In the text below, numerical references in brackets refer both to the drawings in Part II and to the corresponding sections of this document. Bold text in footnotes refers to named sections of Part III, Hand Eye Practice.

6.3

Appraisal of the methodology

As with any creative methodology, there is a range of outcomes and possible meanings that are not limited to the precise aims and objectives of the project. For example, the activity of doodling (5.4.3) enabled experiment, but it also reflected habitual traits and current trends in illustration. The Eden installation (5.3.4) produced a divergent set of references. 22 Some creative activities were less useful than others in addressing the research questions, for example, layering scanned drawings (5.3.2) 22

See Hand Eye Practice, The fall.

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was primarily a compositional exercise. Animating (5.3.3) provided a means of refiguring, but the process was repetitive and far removed from the act of drawing. Initially the project was informed mainly by my own drawing/reflecting/re-viewing practice; by looking at the drawings of others and by reading the texts of practitioner/researchers. By contrast, in the later stages, the research project was greatly informed by wider textual study. This shift in emphasis is reflected in the differences between Part II and Part III of the thesis. The latter is certainly a response to the concerns raised by the former, but a final stage of looking back over drawings and creating links between texts and drawings was necessary in order to demonstrate the connections. A greater integration of approaches throughout the project and a greater correspondence between these two parts of the thesis as they developed would have made the relationship more explicit. This conclusion attempts to tie everything together. One of the strengths of the methodology was the use of note-making. It brought together all aspects of the methodology (observational drawings, doodles, diagrams, reflective comments and commentary on texts), providing a space in which the reflective, cognitive qualities of drawing were developed and the practical, creative aspects of reading and writing were brought to the fore (5.4.1).

6.4

Responses to research questions

During the first half of the project, the following factors emerged as being of relevance in the consideration of this drawing practice, and the conventions to which it adhered, as knowledge-making: • the determination of where and what to draw, and the contingencies of circumstance; • the bodily positioning of the practitioner; • the desire and the failure to capture; • the way in which subject/object positions are constituted; • the experience of alterity and empathy in the process of drawing others; • the role of manual dexterity; • the role of visual skills and habits; • the materials and tools used.

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Making temporary fixtures The convention of life drawing normally requires the body of the model to be held still or arranged for the purposes of drawing (5.1). The move away from this, by drawing in public environments, recognised the significance of circumstance and bodily positioning (5.2). Views were often partially obstructed. Bodies were clothed. I was sometimes too close or too far away to see clearly. Rather than being held in stasis, the body was perceived in a state of motility and agency. The figurative outcomes were contingent on many factors outside my control. Attention to particularity became harder with this approach and there was a tendency to generalise. However, with this came a recognition of the fleeting, slippery quality of perceptual experience; the way in which drawing is an attempt to remember, with pre-held knowledge filling the gaps in vision. I compared the sparse nature of the fixtures that are made by drawing with the apparent plenitude of the photographic image or video recording. The desire to hold on to that which is seen, to grasp it by creating a lasting reference or description, is a motivation of observational drawing analogous to those of other knowledge-making enterprises. But the figurative settlements of drawing result from the temporality of bodily performance: the selective, darting/fixating focus of the eyes; a progressive build-up of hand-made marks; and the interplay of action, adjustment and reaction as the drawing unfolds. 23 Confronting boundaries Situating myself in a public place, surrounded by those I was drawing, was an attempt to change the relationship between drawer and drawn. Before this, I had felt myself affected by the experience of drawing, such that subject and object positions were not clear cut. I wished to examine this further by minimising any sense of detachment and making sure I was fully visible when drawing, so that drawing would constitute a relationship of facing others. 24 Positioning myself as part of the crowd, or part of the scene/seen, made me avoidable by those I was drawing. Crows and other birds were particularly evasive. Instead of giving attention to particularities I found myself settling for generic outlines or silhouettes. My underlying concern was corporeality in general, not only human bodies, however in the observational drawing practice I never completely avoided the

23

For a discussion of drawing as a dialectical process of knowing and not knowing, see Cain

(2006) and her references to the writings of Marion Milner. 24

The potential of drawing to be a relationship of respect is discussed in Facing.

36

taxonomic tendency of the knowledge system within which I was brought up.25 Section 5.2 shows distinctions based on species in the conduct and categorisation of drawings. The practice of drawing over drawings (5.3.1) was an attempt to break down such distinctions: here the determination of figure and ground is disrupted, as one drawing becomes the ground for another; domains of difference overlap and partially efface each other. Describing relationships There was a dual aspect to the research, which at first appeared contradictory: on the one hand I was drawing the bodies of others; and on the other hand I was considering drawing as a means to understand my own embodied experience. Rather than characterising the former as an externalised view of the body and the latter as a concern with the body’s interiority, I began to understand their interconnectedness. This was informed by Merleau-Ponty’s description of embodiment as an alternation between subject and object positions in which there is an awareness of both seeing and being visible.26 Bodily experience is constituted in this dual awareness. Drawing can be regarded as a means of figuring embodied relationships. When drawing the face of another person, feelings of empathy or the awareness of alterity affected figurative outcomes; the other person’s active response, passive disregard, or unawareness of being drawn, also had a determining effect.27 Drawings I made of crowds of people, or of crows, described a relationship of comparative anonymity (5.2.1). Detaching and connecting visions Early on, various strategies were used to destabilise manual and visual skills, for example drawing with my left hand or without looking at the paper (5.1.1). Drawing the moving body was a further means to unsettle the naturalistic, observational drawing practice I learnt whilst at school. This received practice did not include techniques of measuring or perspective, but it relied on the habit of relaxing the focus of my eyes in order to flatten the visual field and make comparisons of dark and light.28 I found a

25

The role of drawing in the delineation of species, practically and philosophically, is discussed

in The distinguishing mark. See also Alpha. 26

This is particularly developed in Merleau-Ponty’s late essay The Intertwining – The Chiasm

(1968, p.130-155); see The knot and Facing. 27

Feminist art history has highlighted examples of inequality of power between artist and

model, showing that drawings are sometimes figure unequal relationships. 28

The academic history of this practice is discussed in The academy.

37

paradox within this optical technique. On the one hand, it reduced the perception of depth and texture, creating the effect of distance from the objects of vision such that an overview of spatial and tonal relationships could be perceived. On the other hand, when drawing a face for example, the correspondence between looking at the face and then quickly, without any adjustment in focus, looking at the drawing, seemed to dissolve a gap. The affecting experience of looking at the face was intensified by the effort to achieve a likeness; and drawing was the means to retain the memory of it.29 Sometimes there was an oscillation between these two paradoxical aspects: the former suggestive of visual judgement and detachment, as implied by the term observational drawing; the latter more of an involvement, constituted by the attempt to imitate and render life-like, as implied by the term drawing from life.30 This contradictory aspect is suggested in John Berger’s description of a drawing he made of the face of his dead father. He summons his drawing skills “to save a likeness” (2005, p.67), aware he is unable to save a life: “I wept whilst I strove to draw with complete objectivity” (2005, p.68). Holding himself back but being drawn in, he continues: “As I drew his mouth, his brows, his eyelids, as their specific forms emerged with lines from the whiteness of the paper, I felt the history and the experience which had made them as they were” (2005, p.68). In this description, drawing is a space in which his father’s face appears, laden with the significance of a lifetime, but conversely it also functions as “the site of a departure” (2005, p.68). When drawing in public I sometimes felt that as I started to draw I constituted myself as an observer (rather than participant), as though the act of looking was enough to set me apart, contradicting the emphasis on embodied awareness and inter-subjectivity that I had hoped to open up. At such times, concentration on visual experience had a distancing effect. By contrast, drawing comparatively still faces or bodies, at close proximity, allowed time for an attitude of attentiveness to develop (5.1.2). In this cognitive state, attention to the visual did not exclude receptiveness to other senses; sounds, smells and tactile awareness also informed the experience of drawing. Containing surfaces Another oscillation was evident when drawing the palm of my hand: I alternated 29

The role of drawing as a means to retain the memory of a loved one is touched on in

Michael Newman’s discussion of the story of Butades’s daughter (2003) see The disembodied eye. 30

The academy and The artisan concern differing interpretations of Renaissance naturalism.

38

between a distant, surveying focus and a precise focus delivering so much detail I felt lost in its complexity (5.1.3). The learnt practice involved using both modes strategically but favouring the former: avoiding minute particularities in order to map out sections, generalise textures and get an overview.31 Rather than the body being seen as a spreading, confusing and uncontained surface, it was to be rendered instantly recognisable as an object, replicating the functional discriminations of perception rather than its confusions, ambiguities or fluctuations. Disruption of that learnt approach meant travelling the surface of the palm skin, and accepting a messier, less predictable and possibly unbounded outcome. Dismantling skills Manual skills also contained variation. Precise delineation required a slightly different grip of the pencil/pen than tonal areas, suggesting cognitively distinct operations. 32 My left hand produced a hesitant line, registering a succession of fluctuations and minor adjustments, whereas the skilled operations of my right hand edited out these inflections of my body in the service of a controlled line. Manual/visual and tool-using skills were considered further during the De-skill Re-skill residency at Drawing Spaces, Lisbon (5.6). Elements of my observational drawing practice were systematically eliminated using such strategies as blind drawing; holding the pencil with my foot; touching the paper directly; and walking to leave a mark. I found that my foot had some dexterity and my little finger could draw with some precision without an implement.33 The most profound difference came from closing my eyes and drawing from tactile sensation only. This enabled an awareness that was normally pushed into the background by concentration on the visual. Sara Schneckloth has considered drawing as a response to remembered sensations, emotional impulses, gestural movements – the viscerality of the body. She describes drawing as a means to reach “a proprioceptive awareness of the physical body” (2008, p.279).

31

In Lines: A brief history, 2007, Tim Ingold contrasts a wayfaring and a connecting approach

to knowledge. This is discussed in The cut. 32

The cognitive functions, metaphorical associations and aura attributed to the hand are

discussed in the The human hand. 33

Many artists have shown that it is possible to draw and paint with great skill and precision

without hands, as the worldwide membership of The Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists shows. A precise, controlled line is drawn directly with a toe in the film by Third Angel, A Perfect Circle, 2009.

39

Feelings are brought to the surface of the paper and made visual in the figurative operations of drawing. Subsequently, when visual reference was reintroduced, I was more open to tactile sensation and attempted to include this in my figurative response. Every mark was provisional, as attention alternated between different aspects of sensation and perception. I realised that my skilled practice of tonal drawing always contained oscillations: between the negotiation of boundary or the relation of dark and light, between different modes of grip and focus. These constant modifications characterise the temporality and provisionality of drawing’s approach to the visual. The intervention of other sensory experience increases the complexity of options. Un-limiting lines The substitution of pencil with ball-point pen was another challenge to habitual or skilled modes of drawing (5.2.1 and 5.4). The marks made with this sticky ink were dark and irrevocable, and drawings were consequently linear and sparing. Pre-marked file paper was used as I began to integrate observational drawing with note-making (5.4.1). The printed grid was the ground for investigating the line, both as figurative demarcation and wayward trajectory. 34 Functions of bounding, delineating, circumscribing and partitioning were compared with those of intersecting, criss-crossing, diverging, and trailing off (5.4.3). Using a cheap plastic pen and file paper to make notes/drawings showed up the overlap between drawing and handwriting when both are reliant on linearity and have a similar economy of means (5.4.1). In my note-making practice they were closely entangled: drawing became a mode of cryptic writing and writing became another means of making a differentiating mark. 35 Like writing, drawing offers expansive possibilities for figurative thought; and within a creative research methodology the cross-over between these practices is potentially productive. Connecting texts The strategy of connecting texts and drawings together was an important development of the methodology. Not only was this done in the note-making practice, it was also tested in a three-dimensional space using lines of cord to connect texts, drawings and 34

The Cartesian geometry of the grid is discussed in The cut.

35

Tim Ingold discusses the overlap between writing and drawing, and the importance of

calligraphy (2007, pp.120-151). See Alpha for an assertion of the indeterminacy of the boundary between mark and sign.

40

other objects (5.3.4), and then in a digital context using hyperlinks as the connectors, in Hand Eye Practice (Part III). When approaching the task of writing I used the operations of drawing as a means of imagining the whole interrelated form: drawing together references; marking significance; delineating arguments (see 5.5.4). The result is a knotting up of numerous strands into one figure, analogous not only to drawing but also to descriptions of the body as an entanglement.36 It suggests that drawing processes can imaginatively inform and expand the activity of writing.

6.5

A history of practice

My research process could be described as a type of excavation. Having dug into my own practice and found the paradoxes, contradictions and tensions outlined above, I considered these as traces of a history beyond my own. In writing the texts of Hand Eye Practice I made connections between discourses in response to the particularity of my research process; discussions of drawing are considered in relation to histories of knowledge and questions of corporeality. Intersections between them are of particular importance. I found that an important intersection was the significance accorded to manual and visual operations in drawing and in knowledge. In English, to grasp and to see are both used synonymously with the verb to understand, suggesting knowledge is a matter of control, consumption or incorporation. This connects to the term capture used in drawing, discussed above. Beyond this, in humanist discourse the hand and the eye are tropes for capability and knowledge; manual dexterity and visual acuity are presented as defining traits, indicative of uniquely human ingenuity and insight.37 In the academic theorisation of observational drawing during the Renaissance, the trained hand and the judging eye appear as instruments of the knowing mind. Drawing is considered productive of knowledge but only within this controlling framework, the rest of the body being omitted from the description.38

36

See The knot. The use of drawing to articulate complex networks of connections can be

seen in the work of Mark Lombardi (Dexter, 2005, pp.176-177). 37

See The human hand, The distinguishing mark and The disembodied eye. The

Renaissance concept of disegno encompasses both ingenuity and insight. 38

See The academy.

41

I would argue that the hand-eye-mind triangulation constitutes a powerful assemblage with which to draw a line between human and animal. The emphasis on two idealised body parts removes the knowing subject from other corporeal contingencies. As art and science diverged in the Modern era, the body was viewed as the expressive object of art or the dissected object of science rather than as the productive locus of knowledge. The pointed/pointing end of drawing was both instrument and determinant in practices of circumscription, and in the visualisation of the body in cross-section. Humanist thought has emphasised the mental, theoretical, articulable, measurable and delineable aspects of knowing over bodily, practical, non-verbal and indeterminate modes of understanding. The governance of reasoning mind over labouring body belongs to a philosophical tradition that traces its heritage back to patriarchal, hierarchical and slave-owning societies of ancient Greece.39 The control of bodies has been a continuing imperative, and the distinction of human from animal is an important and continuing element of this. However, an argument for drawing is that in different hands the drawing implement becomes a means to assert the intelligences and perspectives of those who have not previously been empowered to make a mark. 40 An alternative picture of drawing’s history in the Renaissance is presented in Pamela H. Smith’s book, The Body of the Artisan, 2004. Her description of an artisanal rather than academic history of arts and sciences emphasises the value accorded to material engagements and embodied knowledge. Naturalistic drawing, in this context, is interpreted as the desire to imitate and evoke the powerful effects of Nature by means of careful observation and bodily involvement.41 Although some knowledge practices in drawing’s history have objectified the body, an attitude of attentiveness has been a co-existing theme, and one that opens up ecological understandings of the relationship between bodies and worlds. A recent example of attentive, observational drawing is Michael Landy’s Welcome to my World series, 2004. The artist has made precise studies of his father’s head and foot. The effort and carefulness of drawing is the means of investing value and significance to this body rendered worthless, in employment terms, by industrial industry. 39

Elizabeth Grosz summarises the gendered bias of Plato’s philosophy (1994, p.5).

40

As a teenaged girl I found the skills of drawing to be an empowerment. See also Alpha.

41

See The artisan.

42

6.6

Conclusion

Karen Barad’s use of the term apparatus refers to the dynamic configuration of discursive practices, values, skills, bodies, roles, institutions and equipment that shapes the outcomes of any knowledge-making project (see 5.5.3). The apparatus of observational drawing, as developed in the European academies, has been thoroughly destabilised, critiqued and sometimes overturned by successive art movements. 42 Insofar as remnants of the academic practice survive, they are clinging to a shifting ground, subject to constant adjustments and contests. The apparatus of my own observational drawing practice, within this research project, includes the creative methodology that surrounds it; the discourse of Contemporary Art; the re-evaluation of knowledge claims in 21st century academies; and the particularity of my own bodily experience. The residue of former practice is present in the manual, visual and cognitive operations of my drawing skills and habits. I have identified a number of knowledge-making operations in my practice: it is a means of fixing or marking experiences; registering differences; negotiating boundaries; describing relationships. I have noted paradoxical qualities in visual modes: drawing can support an attitude of detachment or involvement; it can be a matter of getting an overview, or becoming lost in detail; it can feel like I am seeing the world or being looked at by it. When I consider this observational drawing practice as knowledge I find it is characterised by its oscillating modes: depositing/erasing; clarifying/blurring; generalising/particularising; discriminating/relating; figuring/grounding. If such a practice is to generate understandings of embodiment, it is these oscillations and tensions that prevent outcomes from being foreclosed. The fluidity of the sketch, and the role of drawing as testing ground for artistic visions have lead a number of writers to emphasise the provisionality and open-endedness of drawing (Craig-Martin, 1995).43 It has been seen as a practice that does not always conform to prevailing art movements or public values, but operates in an informal and subversive fashion (Petherbridge, 1991), allowing the artist to experiment with 42

See The artist’s hand and Touching the ground.

43

See The disembodied eye for more examples.

43

alternative ways of seeing. I have attempted to identify some of the means by which this experimentation takes place. The term ‘observational drawing’ is inadequate for the possibilities of drawing from visual experience. It implies an unmediated, detached response, when in fact memory and histories of seeing are always brought into play. There are many ways in which visual experiences can be re-membered through drawing. When combined with tactile, auditory, proprioceptive or other sensory awareness, the possibilities for producing figurative responses to multifaceted bodily experience are innumerable. Sara Schneckloth’s drawings and those of Anne-Marie Schneider or Chloe Piene provide contrasting examples. 44 The Drawing Breath exhibition (Wimbledon College of Art, 2007) included drawings by Judy Inglis (Motel Morning), Anita Taylor (Divulge, 2004) and Joyce Gunn-Cairns (Self as Crone, 2003), which in their different ways describe the viscerality and sensation of drawn and drawing body. 45 Drawing provides a way of re-figuring bodies and environments. It does so by means of material interactions and with exceptional economy of means.

6.7

A few words about figures

Although I have been concerned with the materiality of drawing processes I have scanned, re-worked and presented drawings in digital form. While the paper artefact maintains its specificity, figurative content is replicable. The optical/digital translation of the drawn figure into differentials of darker and lighter pixels on a screen is a material event that allows meanings to be shared and added to. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to examine all the implications of this translation (that would be an area for further research), but this movement raises questions regarding the status of the figure:

“But what does it mean to be figured? This concept is of the utmost interest to art history because it oscillates between the visual and the textual and between 44

A selection of Anne-Marie Schneider’s drawings are shown in Drawing Now: between the

lines of contemporary art (Downs et al., 2007, pp.80-83). Chloe Piene’s Headless series, 2003-4, are included in Vitamin D: New Perspective in Drawing (Dexter, 2005, pp.256-257). 45

These recall the work of earlier generations of women artists, for example, Käthe Kollwitz and

Gwen John.

44

matter and sign. It facilitates diverse kinds of understanding by playing one type of knowledge against another. A figure can be a drawing or any description (visual art) but it can also be a metaphor or any description (literary art). Does this imply that a drawing is a metaphor and a metaphor a drawing? Or are such assertions, articulated in words, no more than metaphorical themselves? To contain or control the ‘figure’ is no simple matter. Figuration spreads” (Shiff, 2003, p.479). Leaving aside the question of metaphor, 46 the uncontainable character of figures is worth considering. As Shiff suggests, figures are neither limited to marks on paper nor are they wholly immaterial concepts. I would argue that figures are meaningful arrangements. They do not stand in for things, they are things. They are part of a process of organising and structuring complex experience. For example, walls dividing areas of land and the lines printed on a map that refer to them – both are at once material and meaningful, literal and figural, specific and referential. The figure brings into question ontological distinctions between real and representational, and suggests instead a complex fabric of significance, reference and differentiation. Vicki Kirby refers to Derrida’s use of the term ‘writing’ to encompass all the articulations of difference between and within bodies. This expanded notion of ‘writing’ goes beyond the literary or specifically human domain and becomes in Kirby’s terms a “generalized corporeography” (1997, p.161); in other words, corporeality graphically manifesting itself. She explains as follows: “It is as if the very tissue of substance, the ground of Being, is this mutable intertext – a ‘writing’ that both circumscribes and exceeds the conventional divisions of nature and culture. If we translate this into what is normally regarded as the matter of the body, then, following Derrida, ‘the most elementary processes within the living cell’ are also a ‘writing’ and one whose ‘system’ is never closed (1984, p.9). This would mean that the body is unstable – a shifting scene of inscription that both writes and is written – a scenario where the subject takes itself as its own object, and where, for example, an image could be said to rewrite the image-maker in a movement of production that disrupts the temporal determination of what comes first” (Kirby, 1997, p.61).

46

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) explain metaphors as a means of giving coherent structure to

complex phenomena, thereby creating new understandings and realities. They argue artworks are also a matter of selecting aspects of experience in order to produce coherence. This would suggest that drawings and metaphors are not dissimilar. They also stress that metaphors arise from bodily experience.

45

Kirby’s sweeping move deposits all the signifying activities of human cultures inside a larger category: that of the sense-making functions and differentiations of living systems in general. This includes drawing activities, with their cycles of closure and erasure; addition and subtraction; sedimentation as one drawing becomes the ground for another; iteration as marks are repeated; and replication as procedures and figures are copied. Drawings arise from specific material interactions. They define limits and they suggest ambiguities. They register differentials: of light and dark; of one thing as perceived from another; of figure and ground; of space and time. They also project continuities: smooth gradations of light; duration from one period of time to another; connections between things or states. They provide ways of making meaning and making sense out of the complexity of bodily experience.

46

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Thistlewood, D. ed. (1992) Drawing: Research and Development. Harlow, Longman. TRACEY online journal of Contemporary Drawing Research. [Internet] Available from: [Accessed: 13 April 2009]. Tyler, T. R. J. (2005) CIFERAE – 101 Wild Animals: A Bestiary for Today in Five Fingers. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Leeds. Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991) The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, Mass. and London, MIT Press. V&A (2006) Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design. Exhibition 14 September 2006 to 7 January 2007. London. Wallis, K. (2003) Painting and Drawing the Nude: a search for a realism for the body through phenomenology and fine art practice. Ph.D. Thesis, Faculty of Art, Media and Design, University of the West of England. Wallis, K. (2005) The Continuing Struggle. In: Drawing: Responses to the Environment, Symposium of the Drawing Research Network, June, Kingston University London. [Conference paper]. Wilson, K. (2005) Mimesis and the somatic of drawing: in the context of 20th century western fine art practice. Ph.D. Thesis, Loughborough University. Wimbledon College of Art (2007) Drawing Breath: an exhibition of contemporary drawing marking ten years of the Jerwood Drawing Prize, the annual open drawing exhibition in the UK. London, Wimbledon College of Art. Winter, J. ed. (2007) Draw: Conversations around the Legacy of Drawing. Middlesbrough, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

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Appendix A: summary of written outcomes This section provides a summary of Part III, Hand Eye Practice (on disc). It groups the twelve texts by theme. Human/animal distinctions: In Western European philosophy, there has been a tendency to consider knowledge as a distinctively human attribute – something that distinguishes us from the animals. This is one reason that the mental, theoretical, articulable, measurable and delineable aspects of knowing have been emphasised over bodily, practical, mute and indeterminate modes of understanding.47 With this in mind, I have treated the perceived dichotomy between human and animal as an important context for considering drawing in relation to knowledge. Of the texts I have written, The human hand, The distinguishing mark and The fall all concern stories of human origins that relate the moment, threshold or qualitative shift that marks human from animal. The story of the Fall, in medieval Christian thought, accounted for a perceived separation between Man and Nature (women being covered by the former term but in some dangerous and misleading way also mixed up with the latter). From the Renaissance onward the possibility of regaining lost control, through the application of knowledge and ingenuity, became a motivation for technological advance. The technical drawing implements described in The human hand point to a range of knowledge practices (such as engineering, architecture and cartography) that have had an effect in shaping the environment. The practice of drawing has been at least instrumental in these disciplines. The manipulative ability of human hands and the bi-directional effect of tools (in shaping not only the environment but the brains of humans) have been important to anthropology in its project of locating a point of divergence of human from animal. Metonymically, the hand has also acted as a powerful figure for human ability and knowledge, although conversely the association between knowing and grasping suggests a basic animal need to pin things down. In drawing, grasping is translated into capturing: the notion that fleeting impressions can be caught by acts of figuration. The distinguishing mark picks up the assertion that seeing, delineating and fixing down the animal body constituted the defining 47

I do not wish to imply that this is the only reason. Issues such as social status and gender

also play a part. These have been referred to in the Hand Eye Practice texts.

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moment of prehistoric man. This assertion occurs as part of a Modernist discourse, celebrating universal human attributes of vision and insight. In contemporary art, the primal status of drawing continues to be asserted, with cave drawings cited as evidence, but rather than visual acuity being the mark of human difference, there is an emphasis on the human meaning of marks and traces. The counter-claim, by Derrida (2002), that other animals also leave intentional traces is brought in here. Michael Newman’s suggestion of a continuum between signifying marks and indeterminate marks (2003, p.102) is also taken up in Alpha. This suggestion opens up the possibility for non-human marks to be considered meaningful. Drawing and the body: The attempt to understand the historical background of my own drawing practice brought up the Renaissance as a time in European history when drawing was considered productive of knowledge. The artisan and The academy deal with two different interpretations of naturalism. In the former, Smith describes naturalism as being the endeavour to evoke the creative power of nature through careful imitation and attentiveness (2004, pp.114-27). In the latter, Summers regards it as the exercise of visual judgement, implying a growing awareness of the artist’s individual point of view (1987, p.3). The epistemology of manual, creative practice described in The artisan is relevant to current discussions of research through practice. Smith argues that artisans’ assertion of their knowledge, gained through bodily involvement with materials rather than theoretical thought or classical study, provided a basis for empirical science, although the institutionalisation of scientific disciplines later edited out associations with the body. The establishment of an institution for drawing and design in Renaissance Florence, described in The academy, raised the status of the manual practice of drawing to be part of an academic curriculum. In this context, drawing was understood as a means to arrive at knowledge of ideal forms (in Aristotle’s terms). Drawing also contributed to the emerging practices of investigation, such as anatomical dissection, by being a method of making and recording observations. However, in order for drawing as a discipline to be acceptable within the classical, metaphysical discourse of the time, the bodily aspects of its practice were played down. The sensory operations of drawing were summed up in the rhetorical figure of the discerning eye, judging relative values of dark and light. The manual actions of drawing were described in terms of the trained hand, following the judgement of the eye and obeying the rule of the mind to produce controlled lines or render light and shade effectively. The artist’s idea, existing outside the physical realm, was of primary importance. The triangular assembly of hand, eye and mind, as a finely tuned device for drawing, has continued in the rhetoric 53

surrounding the practice. The embodied skills of the practice have also been passed down, via individual bodies, artefacts, institutions and the discourse surrounding them. The subsequent developments are taken up in The artist’s hand. The trope of the hand became linked with individual authorship in the Modernist discourse of selfexpression. Strategies of appropriation and mechanical reproduction were adopted by artists, in reaction to this emphasis on authenticity. The manual and visual skills of academic practice were critiqued as value-laden and reactionary. By the late 1960s, artists were rejecting manual and visual control, and bringing the body as a whole to the fore. Amid the expansion of definitions of drawing, the manual element has been refigured in terms of touch, as discussed in Touching the ground. Rather than the agency of the artist, this piece of writing stresses the resistance of the surface. Knowledge and the body: Classical metaphysics not only influenced academic discussions of drawing, but also the determination of knowledge in general. The cut discusses how Descartes’s philosophy widened the gap between mind and body in Western European thought from the 17th century. The knowing subject was understood as being separate from material constraints and from the objects of knowledge. This position of detachment provided an epistemological framework for scientific objectivity and has been criticised by feminist writers for masking unacknowledged biases. In their attempt to refigure science, they argue that the world should not be treated as the passive object of human knowledge and technology (Haraway, 2001 and Barad, 2003). Descartes’s epistemology used vision as a metaphorical model. Compared to the other senses, seeing implied physical detachment. The disembodied eye discusses the way in which notions of clarity predominated in this visual model of knowledge. The figure of the mind’s eye was a powerful counterpart to the technologies of observation developed to advance scientific knowledge. As 20th century philosophers challenged the power of the visual, the practice of observational drawing could be criticised for its association with objectification and detachment. However, in recent years, commentators have emphasised the provisionality of drawing: its potential for indeterminacy and ambiguity rather than clarity. Instead of celebrating the depiction of spatial qualities, they have emphasised the temporality of the act (Derrida, 1993). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology provides an alternative to Cartesian epistemology. Rather than a subject/object divide there is an intertwining of the two positions. The knot starts with his example of his own hands touching each other (1962, p.93). Like touch, in his ontology vision is understood in terms of reciprocity. 54

In Facing, this emphasis on relationships and mutuality is related to the situation of drawing others. Lorraine Code has highlighted the connective potential of vision implied by the example of eye-contact (1991, pp.144-172). Her epistemology of respectful interchange provides a model for approaches to drawing based on relational significance, attentiveness and receptiveness toward others.

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