ANTICIPATING A TRACE

Theatre and Performance Design, 2017

This article critically investigates the ‘graphic trace’, commonly perceived in drawings as marks left from physical actions. It is a notion fundamental to current art practices engaging performance and experimental drawing. The graphic trace is investigated through ‘inscription’, which is popularly interpreted as the visual expression of thought through marks or imprints of physical movements, from free-hand sketching to tracing choreographic movements. A critique of this inscriptive ideology shows that the inscribed trace as ‘line’ expresses thought under vitalist schemas exemplified by Bergson’s notion of multiplicity, that life is prompted by a creative event, and Deleuze’s articulation of such an event as ‘lines of thought’. The critique proposed in this article is that a more radically discursive and exceptional event, or ‘multiplicity’, does not really take place. An overview is given of performative, choreographic and process-led practices since the 1970s, while unpacking philosophical concepts of gesture, movement and embodiment. The conclusion lays out the paradox that the graphic trace stultifies thinking, offsetting a more materialist kind of event that affirms discourse in exceptionally different ways.

2014

Closed access. drawology & drawology: one year on are curated by Deborah Harty as part of a wider research project entitled ‘drawing is phenomenology’. The practice-led research utilises drawing, theory and philosophy as a means to test out this premise. For further details of ‘drawing is phenomenology, please see: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ microsites/sota/tracey/space/projects/phenom/dh1.html This is an exhibition catalogue in which Deborah Harty also has exhibits. Available online from issuu.

Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 2021

In this article we reflect on a line traced by Julia. Julia is an undergraduate student in a class that includes a project entitled ‘Lives of Lines’. As part of the activities of this project, the students were asked to draw continuously for a minute with a white marker on a black page, without lifting the marker, and without trying to represent anything in particular. We analyse Julia’s tracing of the line as a kind of improvisation – the same type of improvising that occurs in conversations, music playing, hiking, dancing and countless other activities. We characterize the improviser as a daydreamer immersed in a reverie: an open field of reciprocating forces, desires, surprises and recollections playing themselves out as some of them encounter their way forward free to proceed, and others do not. The improviser becomes an arena in which body, hand, pen, paper, chair, other bodies, traces, words and sounds mutually displace and attract on their own.

Drawing, 2023

On drawing in general We can situate the origin of drawing in the process of human development and the early graphic activities related to neuromotor and perceptive developments of the species, activties and forms of behaviour at the source, among other modalities, of the various graphical forms of communication which "culminate", so to speak, historically in writing. Thus considered, drawing, that is, the graphic act, its procedures and results, is an important element of human intellectual and emotional life; it is both the source and the product of developments of perception, of manual ability, of symbolization, and of the interrelated capacities of cognition and expression in social life. This characterization is relevant for the understanding of drawing as an artistic discipline in our time, as the cultural context today, marked by technological development, transforms the disciplines, pressing their boundaries as it modifies our means of knowledge, communication and expression, relating and transforming in depth the "means of production" in general, and consequently our material and symbolic ways of life. On drawing as art Drawing is both form and discipline. The autonomous discipline (that is, drawing considered and appreciated by itself) is based on the form which is also an "infrastructural" elemen of several other disciplines such as painting, design, architecture, etc. In the comparison and distinction between, for example, drawing and painting, it has been said that drawing is what remains of painting when color is removed. An operation that emphasizes the ideal nature or ideal element characteristic of drawing-a more abstract element by contrast to the essential, unmediated sensuality of painting-and also discloses drawing as an initial moment, level or basic element of the visual creation of forms in the arts of spatial representation , including the arts of space-time experience such as dance, film, among others. Point → Line → Plane → Figure, the primary generative elements of spatial analysis and representation appear in drawing as "concrete abstractions" and characterize its essential functions of mediation in the process of mapping space-time relations, in processes of identification and projection, in the construction of the experience of self and of the world. If we remove the element of color from painting, what remains is the delimitation of forms by the essential, "primitive" contrast between light and shadow. In this way, drawing can be considered as the elementary or primary way of graphical organization of the relations between lights and darks generating the forms and the rhythms of spatial representation. As an autonomous or artistic form, drawing is also a "last" or final form, both synthetic and dynamic, that is, based on a relative economy of means, self-sufficient and, at the same time, implying a space of future developments as a generative form (the same consideration applies to the use of color in the drawing). Drawing is concomitantly and essentially, both complete and incomplete form and process, the embodiment of an essential tension between being and becoming. As synthesis and, at the same time, as the overcoming of form by form, drawing is art itself.

2014

Amanda Ravetz is a film maker and anthropologist. Anne Douglas is a visual artist with a background in sculpture. For the past couple of years, they have been collaborating together as associates in Tim Ingold's research project, exploring drawing in relation to filiming as a way of knowing from inside. They work experimentally in both media, occasionally with other interested researcher from the same project. This paper does not focus on the detail of the experimental processes and collaborations, though you will see one of two examples. Process was the subject of a presentation in Weimar earlier this year and currently available on the KFI website. Instead they want to take a reflective trajectory through the work, drawing on artists and philosophers who have kept them company in the process of the research

2011

Drawing is a way of engaging memory and imagination simultaneously, both exchanging roles to form orders that both stimulate and regulate experience. Early drawing consisted of tracing ones shadow to remember its object when gone. The line of the profile of a missing lover gives stimulus to our memory in a time of loss but it goes beyond just recalling the precise image of the missing object in one’s memory for it can become the vehicle to enter into ones imagination. It both draws and with draws from its sources and allows entrance into imaginative recollections and collections of time past, present, and future. Drawing is a mechanical process, just as the writing of these words are. It engages one’s mind through the mechanics of the hands and the implement in use. Its form is in the forming. It is physiologically a journey into this discourse of what we know and what we can discover through the training of a line on a surface. A line can be a representation of something or it can ...

2016

Journal of Art & Design Education, 1989

TRACEY Journal, 2012

The paper takes the idea of a journey, both actual and metaphorical, for the consideration of questions of process in drawing. The actual journey concerns myself, along with a group of university lecturers from our regular design faculty, who traveled to a similar faculty in Korea on a short-term visiting basis for purposes of working with 1st year design students from three specialist programs. This enabled an educational context for me to introduce drawing as part of a process-based visual thinking methodology, in this instance also in relation to a brief to enable students to participate in a mime festival. Equally, I present my interest in drawing via a small project of my own conducted in tandem with the students’ project, the emphasis of both projects being on movement and space. The latter related phenomena are considered both practically and theoretically, with occasional reference to interests specific to the actual journey and its location.