MA Visual Arts- Drawing

“13 Statements about Drawing”

Camberwell College of Arts, London

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13 STATEMENTS ABOUT DRAWING

Writing, film, or any other creative visual source can be said to ‘be’ drawing. What is meant here by this ‘be’ is that the work, based on the visual signs and evidence, has used the approach of a visual thinking process.

To have picked to study just Drawing as a thing in itself means that what is most important is the process of working through ideas and the representation of those ideas regardless of the form it takes after the visualised thinking process.

My current practice involves the transformation of drawn imagery into other modes of representation such as photography and print. In this way drawing is a visible and integral part of the work, yet is viewed in a wider context.

There are no rules or right and wrongs on materials and methods, the only prerequisite is the desire to express. Drawing can be studied and intellectually explored, put on a pedestal, debated, dissected, subjected to analysis and critical evaluation. There is an entry door into this world, lots to learn and consider. Through another door, its exit, is the way out towards the deconstruction of complexity.

Drawing for me is a way of writing; it keeps your personal way of thinking, your personal way of cutting and pasting things. Drawing is the primary mark that makes you sure about the existence of these thoughts, of these memories. My work uses drawing as a remembrance, as a thread that connects the moments that fade away. Changing the order of lines, like a small god, you can change the story, the fate of the memory.

Drawing has, historically, been used as means of bridging the gap between idea and finished artwork. My drawings are about the gap and not the bridge.

Drawing is a kind of optical illusion, which lets me believe, that behind that clean two-dimension world, illustrated on the piece of paper, the true three-dimension reality hides.

I can call drawing a magical ability. Not everyone can draw because an individual has to learn how to see and how to find the special way of looking at things.

During my research into how surgeons use drawings I was struck by the similarity of gesture in mark making. Drawing appears to be a way of delineating and mapping the territory of the body. Emulating the movements of the surgeon, and combining the trace of organic process of disease and growth, layers of tissue and time are caught on virtual and paper support.

Drawing is a bridge between different worlds. I am very interested in the body as a landscape.  A landscape of traces, wishes and memories. I work from documental images, cutting and pasting. I act as a plastic- surgeon to formulate images drawn from dreams or nightmares.

My work explores issues of Perception, Change and Identity, in order to provoke questions and create dialogue, taking the audience outside their own boundaries. I am interested in valuing the questions themselves as a means of inquiry and in the drawing process as a form of “play” and therefore a process of discovery and learning.

I see drawing as a personal experience. It represents involvement and interpretation. My drawings illustrate objects that can transmit messages, from the radio and the TV set, to little figurines, plants and cups. I am very interested in the objects that populate our interiors and I believe that they belong to our “inner” life, surrounding us and completing us.

Drawing is not only the scratching of marks on a surface. Nor is it only the use of projection to trace an outline, to capture an image. The fluid, provisional nature of drawing, its continual state of being made, allows us to produce new thought from our experience of life.

Exploring self through real places and imagined, I use drawing to define boundaries and then again to move beyond them. Pencil, thread, utility knives, charcoal, paper, etc. are my tools of navigation and exploration.

The drawn line remains as a trace of the movements that my body was making. The production time of the drawing is still evident… the energy and the movement of time still visible. The drawn line is therefore also a record of absence.

Artists:

Stephen White. Lucy Bates. Pete Cernis. Dimitra Bourouliti. Nick Bullions.

Paulina Wanowska. Jenny Wright. Stella Sestelo. Julie McCabe.

Alina Antemir. Charlotte Raleigh. Leah Newman. Elizabeth Dudley.

Dedicated to the man with the green cross.

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Part B’

For Quasimodo, he says (1), the cathedral had been successively “egg, nest, house, country and universe.” ” One might almost say that he had espoused its form the way a snail does the form of its shell. it was his home, his hole, his envelope…”

(1) Victor Hugo, Notre- Dame de Paris, Book IV
(reference on Gaston Bachelard book “The Poetics of Space”, Chapter 4, Nests)