Drawing Phenomenology

Activity: Events › Conference

Description

Drawing Presence.

Keywords: drawing, meditation, phenomenology, experience, place, dwelling, touch.

In 2015 I was involved in a project to explore what the particular value of drawing might be as an investigative practice, in relation to the Circus Street site of the University of Brighton. This area was earmarked for demolition and redevelopment, and making drawings on this site challenged me in ways I wasn’t originally anticipating.

This paper takes the experience of drawing within Circus Street as a starting point to explore the changing nature of place as a catalyst for lived experience. Working from a pragmatic - phenomenological perspective, I propose an alignment of artistic practice with meditation (mindful awareness), to ask how the act of drawing ‘… the state, or the being that is in question cannot be detached entirely from the sense of gesture, movement or becoming.’ (Nancy 2013). Through a discussion of a non-representational drawing practice, manual drawing activities and mindful awareness (counting the breath), I will argue that drawing as process enables an experiential and intimate engagement with the world as ‘grounded in availability and access’ enabling ‘presence’ (Noë 2012). One that allows us to experience the physicality of spaces and the living body body not as separate realities, but as entities that are thoroughly and deeply entwined, in which there is no separation of self, other and the environing world. Dwelling (being present) and touch (making present) are key factors in this, as a means of understanding experience of the embodied self in relation to artistic expression and resulting knowledge.

Period	20 Sep 2017
Event type	Conference
Degree of Recognition	International

Keywords

Drawing
phenomenology
embodiment
experience

Documents & Links

DrawingPhenomenologyProgramme_FINAL
File: application/pdf, 202 KB
Type: Text

The conference aims to investigate and consider the role of drawing as a means to explore and trace our lived experience of the world. The research stems from an interest in what many practitioners/theorists acknowledge as fundamental attributes of drawing: that it is an intimate and immediate process and medium capable of recording the trace of the drawer’s thoughts and bodily movements. The act of drawing is said to reduce the space between the drawer and the drawing, leaving marks on the surface regardless of erasure, subsequently creating a visible trace of both the process of making and the drawer’s thoughts. The conference aims to discuss and debate these widely accepted attributes of drawing to question whether and/or how drawing really can be thought of as phenomenology. The conference aims to provide a space for discussion, dissemination and the exchange of knowledge and suggests the following as starting points in the discussion, as possible themes, prompts and provocations: • What is the relationship between the physicality of drawing and lived experience? • When viewing drawings, is it possible to trace the movement of a drawer’s mind/body? • Are all drawing processes phenomenological? • How can drawing trace the physicality of spaces? • What are the limitations of drawing? • Is materiality a necessity in drawing the trace of lived experience?