Narrative traces through being and places, drawing, performance drawing and painting

Abstract

A reflective observation of a 40-year drawing practice (from the 1970s to the present day), from observational drawing in outdoor environments, to performing Driftsong sound drawings through place, leading to the author’s current concern, woandering to bridge drawing and painting in a pareidolian archaeology. Her practice, rooted for its first decade in observational drawing in outdoor spaces, intensified her awareness of the environment and led her to undertake a research degree investigating whether an interaction between the environment and the practitioner during the process of drawing could be identified. This review follows the author’s practice, highlighting essential influencers, including Linda Kitson, Charles Baudelaire, Jacques Derrida on Emmanuelle Levinas, Astronaut Chris Hadfield and Performance artist Phil Smith. Identifying how the development of the author’s understanding of the environment impacts on her drawing led her to question whether while making work in the outside environment, she may also impact the environment in return. The author later expanded this idea further to wonder if while we make drawings of the environment we may be drawn by the environment too. A significant conversation with her research supervisor the artist David Cross, in which he stated that mass displacement is ‘a defining condition of our times’, together with the planets approaching environmental catastrophe, prompted the author to give a paper proposing Psychogeography be updated to Reciprocalgeography, and that the stories of the journeys undertaken by those displaced persons be heard as a ‘gift for the common treasury for all’ (Gerard Winstanley 1649). This review concludes with a response to an invitation to write on the thinking and making of her current practice. The author, combining the physical, emotional and conceptual process of making, proposes to woander on a pareidolian archaeology, allowing serendipitous happenstance and the unconscious, to have a hand in the making process.