When drawing speaks: The dialogic traces of a continuous line

Abstract

This article focuses on my video Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible, an artwork featured in the exhibition ‘Drawn to time’. Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible was made as attempt to create a continuous line drawing using video. The aim of my analysis is to explore how Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible can be read as dialogic, and how the ‘complex interplay of cognitive, somatic, and material conventions’ (Lovatt 2021: 10) that converge in this drawing can provide insights into the dialogic dynamics of this artwork and drawing more broadly. Drawing, claims art Historian Anna Lovatt, ‘is fundamentally relational and deceptively complex’ (2021: 10); it is the complexity and fundamental relationality that I seek to explore through my analysis of this drawing in relation to those of other artists, including Cy Twombly, Richard Long and Lygia Clark. Theorist Roland Barthes’ writing on Twombly supports an exploration on how bodies, surfaces and marks interact to create drawings; and art historian Cornelia Butler’s discussion of how ‘idea-space’, as realized by Clark, is used alongside Barthes’ formulations. In essence, this paper seeks to convey a sense of moving inside and outside drawing in a dialogic process that entangles intentions, marks, mediums and reflective analysis.