Please scroll down for images. The text that follows was presented at my thesis defense.
Field & Plane
This drawing is taller than you are; it occupies all the space in front of you, but there is a choice presented. Should you walk to the left, or to the right? Behind, or before? Immediately before you, flanking the door and flowing ribbon-like into the room, there are fine black lines that twist, describe and speckle across a grey ground. These lines beg you to examine them, and so you make a choice to step forward to your right.
Your momentum will lead around drawn notation and the gestural figure, lyric space and natural territories, feminist subjectivity and fractured perspective.
Drawing is the act of a quintessential human desire to leave a mark. It is document, exploration, dialogue and transformation; as Emma Dexter says in Vitamin D, it “is a device for understanding our place within the universe.” My drawn, self-portrait lines are an extension of my presence. Each track reveals the passage of time, the movement of clothing, and patterns of freckles, all of which combine in a seemingly random fashion of rupture to layer and break in an entropic push/pull progression of gathering disorder on the page.
One’s nostalgia for pen and ink, or the knife-sharpened pencil, floats specter-like around drawing. The process can be thought of as inherently romantic in our age of technological dominance; to use the hand directly in the production of a mark, rather than in a mediated fashion through a computer mouse or digital pen, extends a lineage to past eras’ pre-computer graphics. This drawing installation operates on the trajectory of neo-romanticism: subject, style and attitude focus on an imagined landscape that relates the body to its situation, reveals decidedly handmade and imperfect marks, and assumes an aspect of the calm sublime through grey vastness. There is no overriding conceptual approach at play.
There is, however, a conceptual heritage to the exterior coloured lines, counterbalancing the intuitive romanticism of the interior drawings. After an initial pared down architectural drawing was laid out for the exterior by my hand, subsequent lines were drawn by a group of volunteers. I gave them minimal instruction: “Each person should draw 5-10 randomly placed straight lines of indeterminate length within the given margins, and with the coloured pens provided.” Such instruction, and the resulting drawing, lean heavily on the conceptual drawing project of Sol LeWitt, whose influential work, “10,000 lines drawn at random” has seen many variations since the late 1960s. LeWitt considers the creative enterprise complete once he has written his drawing down; it is always people other than the artist who actually follow the rules and make the conceptual works take visual shape. For my drawing, a collaboration developed as the volunteers responded to the lines that I had already placed. Their decisions forced me to relinquish a large degree of control, and also served to disrupt the illusory perspective I had created. The dynamism of the random lines breaks any geometric, built structure that the original drawing may have signified into falling, sparkling facets of frozen moments. Elementary school brightness radiates out of the markers; the colour is blotchy and the lines often imperfect when viewed up close. One can only understand the exterior when the interior is viewed as well. The two sides are an essay in “compare and contrast”.
In the figurative black ink works, lines and marks are contours and creases derived via my direct, system-seeking mostly blind-contour observation – a visual language pulled out from within the process and art school history of drawing in the studio. Temporal and emotional knowledge of a body within a spatial system is revealed as the figure takes over and assumes the symbolic language that creates the mapped landscape. One may read multiple stories in the density of layers, but the specific experience and personal narrative of the pictured body is not central to the work and it is not necessary or desirable to see an individual history. The lines web together and trail off into ephemeral, grey luminosity. A West Coast atmosphere, a suggestion of place, a glimpse of bodily gesture reaches beyond the fingers of specificity. Looking at my hanging drawing becomes a romantic act of retrospection; one can be drawn into the deeper exploration of a journey, and contemplate a system which is perhaps beyond reach, maybe imagined, but nevertheless infinitely engaging.
Looking at this work necessitates walking, which in turn leads to a more complete knowledge of person and place. A viewer journeys through space, both real and imminent, while investigating the 120 curving linear feet of drawn terrain. Pace, rhythm and pause carry and hold the walker as he looks. It is likely that she will notice something of interest when walking, as the speed allows for looking. Looking develops familiarity, stops at difference, has a source or frame of reference, and thereby breeds one’s sense of self. Subjectivity lies in the perspective of the gaze. Identity forms in relation to belonging to a place. The dissolving, dynamic planes and shards on the outer surface of the work reference Julie Mehretu’s anthropophagic and kinetic drawn inquiry into aggregate layers of identity. The inner geography is abstracted, fragmented and magnified reference to the female figure.
Luce Irigaray’s concept of recreating women’s subjectivity to be distinct from men and beyond a base association with nature defines a problem central to my practice. She writes that the masculine subject subsumes the feminine other to achieve the illusion of self-sufficiency, and that this denies women their own subjectivity. It is the “excessive, unrepresentable feminine [that] cannot be contained within current systems of representation” which Irigaray states is the figure of a new, equal subjectivity that would permit people to move beyond binary notions of sexual difference, therefore further understanding the body as an identity-shaping site. As in Deleuze & Guittari’s theorizing, the body becomes a process, rather than a thing. Attempting to describe a representation of the moving, transmutating, in-process body that establishes fresh possibilities for feminine subjectivity arose during my drawn examinations. Because the female figure is a centuries old focus for male subjectivity in art, I must investigate a woman’s perspective in drawing; find a language of lines that speaks to a female position. Figurative elements make reference to nature, but the panoramic, cartographic product of this installation is as unknown and manufactured a territory as the disunited body. Recording the figure so that it and its texture are fractured, multiplied, magnified and transformed from representational object to abstracted spatial and temporal experience refutes the pleasure of scopic viewing. There is nothing to support masculine subjectivity. Something new is sought in the rubble of familiarity. Fragmentation engenders an alteration of the expected subject. As in the huge waxed pages of Toba Khedoori’s minimalist and alienating drawn architecture, where the ground has disappeared into a minute cacophony of studio dust and stray hair but the ink-figured object stands clear to the point of specificity, I have charted my authorship by leaving remnants spread across the paper. The drawing is me; my process of looking, my recorded motion, my body, my sense of place. Landscape systems arise out of the multiple perspectives of an observed but fragmented body. The personal becomes expanded by place, and when a viewer walks along the canyon walls of this articulated, hanging drawing, the discovered place implodes into the personal.
Cartography or blueprint, map or plan, the drawings on both sides speak to an investigation of spatial construction. Even the object-nature of the installation as a whole describes sinewy geography. The organic landscape of wild territories touches the geometry and neon light of urban settings where the drawings’ paper rubs back-to-back; the two spaces existing in a fragile tension, since the city is a parasite on the natural environment, but nature’s wild tenacity threatens concrete order. Like a West Coast city, whose setting defines its self-image as a frontier town of dreams and mythological unknowns, the drawings lure one in.
Mystery and beauty arise out of a wildness residing in between the maze of line and the void of blank grey space – a wildness which is ineluctable yet also ineffable, and difficult to discuss without causing limitation. The sublimity of the coastal landscape inhabits our collective conscious here, although the land that is so influential to person and economy is endangered by our societal presence and way of thinking(speaking). “… In the current “state of emergency” that is the social relations dominated and defined by expanding capital, it is crucial – because wildness is being marginalized and is disappearing in those relations – to attempt to envision alternative social relations which do not marginalize wildness.” After extending this warning, Tadzio Richards suggests in his 1998 paper Crumbling Towards the Sun that creative practice “effects attitudinal conditions” and “as such, …could open the body into an affinity with disappearing wildness.” He asks how and with what grammar this is to be achieved if one is to avoid limp, ineffectual nostalgia. Part of the answer may be acting (thinking/speaking) through looking – a creative response of observation and record that communicate without words the multi-faceted interrelationship of one’s identity with specific environments. Through this type of investigative procedure, the drawing entertains an unconventional language of process and being, thereby maintaining an attitude which respects wildness.
Standing within the belly-turn of the installation, one experiences a physicality of penetration not normally associated with viewing a drawing, as the surround creates a site that precludes the gallery walls – creating an unknown from the (dis)order of temporal observation and the socialized body. The drawn territory forms a field of inquiry, and a boundary wall. Similar to Ed Pien’s spiralled drawing installation “The Promise of Solitude” with its mythical monsters and strange panoramas that locate one in a site of difference, my drawing holds a physicality of scale that dominates a viewer. When inside the piece, one cannot help but compare viewpoints – take some bearings, notice a landmark to show the way in this meditatively silver, figured land.
Covering the paper in silver-grey gesso accomplishes two things: it transforms the paper from a readable, flat, expected material to one in disguise, as the gesso causes warps and ripples to form in the paper and makes it look like thick fabric; secondly, the pale grey colour invites contemplation because it diffuses light, lowers the contrast between figure and ground, and most importantly is reminiscent of cloud cover. The coastal hallmark is enveloping, gentle yet threatening, and able to elicit memories of fall’s decay or spring’s renewal (are the drawings dwindling, or becoming?), where heavy wood smoke hangs in the moisture-laden air. The grey closes in between the mountains; it makes one aware of how little space a person occupies. One can become cognizant of being on a cloudy day, exactly because the atmosphere presses down on mood and flattens the joyful exuberance of sunny exclamations. Grey lets one know what white and black are, as space is made comprehensible by walls, or humanity’s hiccup by fossils in geological strata.
A voiced, moving conduit of emotion and persona in music and poetry is usually defined as lyric. Here, lyric plays out not only in the graceful curve of paper and line, but also in the formation of a personal space to enter and engage with. The drawings use lyric to engender an ontological feeling. Philosopher-poet Jan Zwicky provides example and support for my approach to lyricism through her work. She suggests that “lyric” is an “integrative mode of thought … a flight from the condition of language,” and relates to metaphor as a location of explicatory imagery. As “an evocation of presence” lyric harbours the facilitation of understanding (Zwicky). Seeing maps and communities, figure and ground, a viewer may construct a very individualized sense of place and time within the drawings, or move through shifting layers of object and space to recognize a more disparate heterogeneity of location for experience. Nevertheless, presence circulates from the quiet physicality of the work’s voice.
This drawing is taller than you are. It barely fits its curled form into the room. Its sides teem with idea and image, and yet it remains quiet – still as you circle and stare. Despite displacement of the familiar, an index to a new language, and the sublimation of sculpture into drawing via installation, the work foregoes the formation of an absolute barrier. Yes, the beast is gentle. You find your way across conceptual plains, around romantic curves and over wild hills, negotiate changing perspectives and shifting figures, play explorer to the drawing’s map. And when the lines have been examined, the grey ground rested upon, you choose to leave the drawing behind – but you might understand our place in the universe just a little more.
