Notes on the Drawing Phenomenology conference Loughborough September 19 – 20th Day One

The three arms of the drawing research group

The Drawing Research group hosts a two day conference every year and there are always interesting papers delivered and workshops to attend. It reminded me of how many different ways of thinking about drawing as a practice there are and the experience of listening to others talk about their practice made me ask questions of my own approach to drawing. This year the theme was ‘Phenomenology’, and was centred on ‘the lived experience’, a phrase I must admit I do find questionable because it suggests that there are some experiences that we can have outside of those we have when alive.

Last year I was asked to give the after-dinner address, a somewhat difficult task as I had to entertain a group of people who had been eating and drinking and who had had a long day listening to papers being delivered. I was reminded of this because the notebook I took to make conference notes was the same one I used last year and I found the roughed out draft of my ‘off the cuff speech’. I’d forgotten about that and might type up those old notes, as several people did ask me if there was a transcript of what I had to say back then.

My notes on the conference presentations are very much translations, ruminations and selections from what people said. These notes reflect my own interests and in no way should they be taken as transcriptions of what was delivered. So if anyone who was there does happen to read this, please forgive my very personal interpretations and idiosyncratic take on the proceedings. I also get tired and at times irritated. I could of course edit out comments that consist of my more subjective interjections, but I have decided not to, as I suspect these are more revealing as to the actual nature of these events. 

Day one

The opening paper was delivered by Deborah Harty, and was titled “Drawing is Phenomenology”.

One of the first issues about conferences is that people mention a lot of sources for their ideas. These I always find interesting, but what you can often find yourself doing is trying to figure out the name that was mentioned and trying to put down enough information so that you can find the cited text later and then as you are doing that the speaker is moving on so you can miss the next point. Younger members of the audience with more fluid minds can perhaps keep up, but I’m afraid I must admit to lapses in concentration.

I simply mention this because at the beginning of her presentation Deborah mentioned a Geoffrey Bailey reference from his PhD thesis, which after research I now presume is; ‘Drawing and the drawing activity: a phenomenological investigation’, but at the time because I was writing ‘check out Geoff Bailey’s PhD thesis’, I might have missed something. However back to what I did record…

There are two essential issues when thinking of drawing as a phenomenological experience. 

A drawing as a record of its own making and a drawing as a record of the thoughts of its maker.

Several of the ideas in this presentation had come from Deborah’s experience of an AHRC cultural exchange project, ‘Drawing Through Touch’. She had worked with people who had lost their sight and they were asked to draw fruit, such as a pineapple, by touching it. Their experiences were recorded by them drawing onto paper designed to raise the black lines of the drawing when heat-treated. This interested me as I had sometime ago looked at ‘swell paper’  as a way of recording information and I had as long ago as 1969 been involved in a collaborative drawing project in Wolverhampton investigating a very similar idea. But we had no ‘swell paper’ or associated technology back then. What I did remember was that most people involved did not really draw what they felt, because they were sighted people who were blindfolded, they drew what they remembered things looked like. Only a few people were able to concentrate totally on the sensations of touch and those that did made much more interesting drawings that re-conceptualised their relationship with the objects being touched. In this case although all the people had lost their sight, some had always been blind and others had in the past been able to see, once again the memory of sight distorted or shaped the invention of drawings made in response to touch.

The drawings were very interesting, especially as they were projected on a screen so they had no actual physical presence, we couldn’t go up to them and touch them, their presence now totally virtual and visual, a paradox I found fascinating and one I thought an interesting analogy about researchers and their subjects.

The central issue for me was communication, what is it to explain to someone who can’t see what something looks like? Do these drawings explain anything? Are they rather indications of reactions to the world, traces of movements made in reaction to sensations received, echoes of actions, re-played; finger contacts of flesh to fruit, re-played as fingers through a drawing marker. From these indications we then read or interpret things, rather like Sherlock Holmes we apply inductive reasoning and move from specific instances of experience to form some sort of generalised conclusion. However all inductive reasoning is questionable and science tends to rely on deductive processes. But here goes some inductive reasoning.

If you look at the drawing of the pineapple below the person that did it has an idea of up and down, the fruit itself forms the base and the leaves of the crown are where you would expect them to be. It might even have been drawn by tracing round the edge of the object. But when you touch there is no up or down, simply a continuous surface.

The next drawing however seems to me to be more to do with touch than remembered sight. There is a continuous surface and a sense that this is what you feel when you grasp the pineapple to pick it up.

Both drawings attempt a direct response to a physical stimulus and when made the drawings themselves become things that can be experienced. This is what I would call the phenomenology of the image. As a perceiver I’m very aware of how in this case I’m limited to the sense of sight, but my conceptual awareness is such that I can try and ‘experience’ in the mind/body what it might be like to touch.

Deborah went on to show her own work. She is very interested in rhythm and how it is created by the interaction of edges and overlaps between structures. Repeated actions and their resultant forms are seen as allowing for a more phenomenological interpretation because these types of structures allow you to see difference easily, (such as one bent line amongst a hundred straight ones) and by presenting their structure as an open framework, you can see both how things were done and work out how long its making would have taken. You can deduce from careful observation what was done first and then second and so forth. These are aspects that I associate with Modernism, issues about truth to materials and ‘what you see is what you get’ which was one of the mantras of Minimalism.

It was stated that in order to access phenomelogical experience you need to cut down on the stimulus. Simple structures allow you to experience changes.

This is something I understand and know how it works, but I would also argue that someone who is very aware of the situation would notice small changes even within a very complex field of experience. A tracker will notice an animal caused broken leaf amongst a forest of leaves and trees and insects and other stuff.

We were finally directed towards the work of Jordan Mckenzie, in particular his exhibition ‘Drawing Breath’. As the public enter the exhibition space, their hands are taken and placed over his heart. They feel his breath go in and out. He then fills a small plastic bag with his breath, coats it in charcoal and explodes it in order to leave a trace of this breath on the wall for the duration of the exhibition. 

Jordan Mckenzie: Drawing Breath

Mckenzie is probably most well known in the media for his exhibition ‘Spent’ which included a visualisation of his cum by sprinkling charcoal dust onto it. I only mention the media coverage because it points out how culturally loaded our body and its functions are. We breathe and no one’s interested unless we have ‘bad breath’ or look as if we might be passing on an infectious disease, we spit, sneeze, sweat and pass urine, defecate every morning and cry when upset, our body is constantly ejecting and injecting in order to stabilise its relationship with the world and because it is so important to us we culturally build on our relationship with it. It is both a site for phenomenological experience and a site of cultural construction. Hartley is attempting to remind us of the elemental physical nature of the situation, but as an image maker and someone who looks for analogical relationships between things, I’m afraid I could not help but make the situation more complex. Her point was though, that breath itself could be a mark maker. If you have never reduced a few sticks of charcoal to dust and then tried drawing with the dust by blowing it around on a sheet of white paper you should. It’s both exhausting and exasperating and is an experience very closely related to what happens every time you try and fix a charcoal drawing. See.

Jane Cook’s presentation ‘Drawing the Domestic’ introduced us to her PhD thesis, which is a practice led investigation of the home through a phenomenological drawing process. She covers her kitchen work surfaces in paper, careful to sandwich carbon transfer paper between different layers. Once set up this paper surface collects all the traces and marks of kitchen life.

Jane was asked the question, ‘How do your drawings start?’ and the answer was the catalyst for the work shown. John Berger’s three categories of drawing, ‘observation, ideas and memory’, were cited as influential, as well as Merleau Ponty’s search for, “a philosophy that accounts for space, time and the world we live in”.  Phenomenology of Perception, 1962 p.7

Jane also cited Rawson’s use of a Bachelard phrase, pointing to the idea that a drawing is a kinaesthetic sign, and that drawing is the union of seeing and making, a term she had taken from Hill. (I presume Jonathan Hill but I would have to research this)

Using charcoal made from over cooked chips and bread as an eraser (an old use for bread), as well as cleaning products she has developed a body of work that references the site of its making and the codes of domesticity. This has included what was called ‘kitchen lithography’, a form a printmaking that echoes traditional processes, by using butter and coke on tin foil. Other ‘kitchen’ processes are also used to make drawings, burning, freezing etc.

Tony Rosenberg’s ‘ New Beginnings and Monstrous Births: Notes towards an appreciation of ideational drawing’ was sited as being useful in the construction of concepts regarding how drawing can carry ideas.

This reminded me of Bill Buxton a design theorist, who stated that these 5 issues are important to think about when sketching out ideas.

1 Transitions (the in-betweens) are more important than the states of a design because they are experiences either in sequence or with variation when there is interaction. This should accommodate time and dynamic.
2 Sketches should leave big enough holes for the imagination.
3 A sketch should communicate the feel rather than look.
4 Sketches should be about ideas, not solutions. Sketches come early, solutions come later.
5 Sketch and prototype is two ends of the design process where different principles work:

Bill Buxton is an interesting speaker and is an example of those people who are working across disciplines and in doing so illuminate each discipline by seeing it from a new perspective.

Sometimes it’s useful to look at design theorists when thinking about how drawing is effective, because designers all use drawing and they have to be very clear as to how they use it to communicate, Fine Art students, should not worry about dipping into a designer’s territory every now and again.

At this point I began to reflect on the importance of documentation when looking at this type of practice. The stains and one to one rubbings or round the edge drawings, together with the carbon paper copies, are all documents of traces. These are then further documented by the videos and photographs taken to record the process. These documents are essential and without them there would be no PhD, no presentations to conferences etc.

Drawing therefore becomes performative, its processes becoming actors on a stage, choreographed by the artist, who becomes a ringmaster, agent for the materials of making and promoter of the show.

Cornelia Parker: Hot Poker

Cook's work did remind me of Cornelia Parker's 'Hot Poker', again using a domestic utensil as a drawing device, but one with a long history of associated domestic violence, the poker. But Parker is a much more sophisticated artist and always combines a focused conceptual concept with a materials choice. Hot Poker is a print made as a laser-cut archival inkjet print, cushion-mounted on archival mount. The original was of course a folded piece of paper burnt through with a poker, but these prints rely on the way a laser cut will slightly burn the edges of what it cuts through. So in this case it is a trompe-l'œil play on appearance. Parker nearly always adds another layer of meaning.

Martin Lewis presented ‘Does Sisyphus ever get bored’, a presentation given whilst he played a video of his latest work, that consisted of him tapping on a wall mounted roll of paper for over an hour.

I had seen Martin present before and knew what to expect as he had over a year ago moved from paper based image production into a more performative practice. This reinforced my growing awareness of how vital documentation was now becoming. I used to teach film theory and one of my classes was devoted to how the selection and use of lenses, together with camera angles, lighting etc. were used to establish certain types of ideas and that these issues were just as important to a documentary film maker as a constructor of fictions. However non of the people presenting seemed to consider this. I must admit here to a personal issue, because I did submit a paper to this conference which was rejected on this very issue, which was about the phenomenological impact of using different lens based recording mechanisms to photograph or film drawings for screen or projected presentations. Oh well perhaps another time.

Martin reminded us of the term ‘disegno’, a word I have drawn attention to several times in this blog, it is taken from the Italian word for both drawing and designing or planning, which carries a complex meaning, involving both the ability to make a drawing and the intellectual capacity to invent a design or concept. Drawing being both a visualisation of a possibility and a rendering of what can be seen. However Martin was using the term to get us to see the link between planning and instruction, as in Sol Lewitt’s work. I posted recently on how ‘disegno’ could be used as a guide to an understanding of Sarah Sze’s work as drawing, it is I see now a problematic word that could be used by anyone to argue that drawing is in effect everything that an artist does that is about making intellectual decisions. If a term gets too widely used it can become meaningless.

Martin asked the question, “is boredom necessary to the making of art?”. I could see the relevance in relation to his practice, but personally, drawing is what I do to get away from boredom, I don’t think I’ve ever been bored when drawing. This reminded me of when I was a boy and lived in Dudley. My friend Tony Roberts was the son of a zoo keeper and this meant that I could use a backdoor into the zoo when I went to see him. We spent hours roaming the grounds of Dudley Zoo and we knew when animals were in a bad mental state because of how they moved. In particular the polar bear would stand and rock from side to side, the lion would sway its body to some sort of inner rhythm and other animals would when in distress, especially the monkeys and apes, rock themselves into some sort of oblivion. You see the same thing on the streets now, homeless people huddled from the cold, rocking with that same inner metronome that takes it all away. In the book Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why by Ellen Dissanayake, she takes us back to our childhood, to the time when we are rocked to sleep by our mothers and how important the early exposure to rhythmic singing and comforting rocking is to us. I looked at Martin’s work and wondered if it was not so much about researching boredom, but about seeking comfort in distress. This of course is not how he would see his work, which he would argue is about intentional judgements made for new expressions, boredom being, “the dark star of creativity”. See examples of him working here.

Marion Arnold’s presentation ‘Sensing the knowing hand: a phenomenological drawing tool’ began with a powerful reminder of how important our hands are by showing photographs of Father Michael Lapsley who has prosthetic hands after losing his in a bomb explosion, Marion was pointing out how we become much more aware of things through their loss.

The core of the presentation was however around printmaking and how it effects the thinking of the maker. Printmaking extends the sensibility of the artist, the tools of printmaking being further extensions of the hands. The trained hand also reflects the intelligence of the maker.

I worked teaching printmaking for many years and my first job at the art college was to set up the print area. Arnold pointed to the issue of reversal, something I remember well, at one time being able to write fluently backwards because of the fact I was making a long series of etchings that had text on them. Your mind does adapt to the situation, rather like that film made by Ivo Kohler and Theodor Erismann about how we quickly adopt to new ways of seeing. We made a rough version of their goggles on the foundation course some years ago and tried the experiment out, it worked.

Marion Arnold’s presentation focused on the artist’s control, the way that every hand has its own unique signature, and sited Fry’s copying of a Klee drawing with a ruler as an example of how ‘la patte’ or the artist’s touch is important.

Printmaking was looked at as a means of developing an autographic signature, rather than using print as a reproductive process. An area that I believe becomes blurred when working with computers and associated digital printers. After many years of making etchings and lithographs including using traditional stone, I have been making digital prints this last two years. I have decided that the technology is good enough to allow for a personal intervention and in the same way that an etching is always first and foremost an etching, I allow the specificity of the digital print process to flow with my ideas, and because of my background in print, can adjust paper type, ink quality, colour, shape size etc. in such a way that when the prints are produced everyone knows they are mine. Perhaps my feeling about this stems from my time working in a drawing office. Even though we were all using technical drawing pens and associated implements such as French curves and the older ruling pens that used the space between two flexible metal jaws to hold the ink for drawing thicker or coloured lines; everyone in the office recognised everyone else’s drawings. We could tell from such tell-tale signs as the ratio of thick to thin lines, whether or not lines stopped on or went over edges, the attention to details, such as whether or not to include isometric inserts or whether to use Letraset or stencil lettering.

I was particularly interested in the idea of printer’s proofs as a type of checking process. This does relate very closely to how drawings evolve. Putting the drawing away so that you can come back to it with fresh eyes is very similar to taking an impression to see what you have got. I wasn’t that sure that drawing for print involves a different working consciousness, I just work with each material as it comes. A pencil is a tool that works in a particular way and an etching although involving a much wider variety of things, (drawing through hard ground, biting metal etc.), is again simply a tool to get to know, likewise a computer with all its attendant software and outputs. I think there is a certain mystique about the handmade, we ought to remember that all the reproduction processes were just that, ways of reproducing things. In etching aquatint was a way to reproduce the qualities of watercolour, soft ground techniques were invented to try and reproduce the effect of chalk drawing.

Rather than emphasising that drawing for print is a different working consciousness, I would say that you never draw for something else, you either make a mistake and try and use a technology in a way that you have used something else, such as trying to make pencil lines like charcoal lines, or you get to know the medium and work with it. There is a very good book on Paula Rego’s prints and in it her printer talks eloquently about how she needed to engage with each print process before she could settle on a drawing style that would suit the process. Drawing with litho ink is so different to drawing with a burin and different again to drawing with a mezzotint rocker. A useful exercise is to take up something very different, such as drawing in silverpoint. Because you have to prepare the ground, it makes you aware that the surface you are going to make a mark on is part of the decision making process, something easy to forget when drawing on untreated paper. However, the paper chosen to make a pencil drawing on, is as vital to the final expression as the type of acid used to etch your lines out in an etching. Nitric etches very differently to ferric chloride, a non feathered line looks totally different to a feathered one, a high concentrate of acid etches very differently to a low concentrated solution. These are all simply things to take into account when making an image and the more you work with the materials the more sensitive you become to them.

Marion knows William Kentridge, something I’m very envious of and quoted him as saying that, “It’s as if done by another hand”. I wonder if he was thinking about the process of working with a printer when editioning. I used to work as an editioner for other artists. Terry Frost for example used to come to the studio and make his brush strokes over several plates and would talk about what he wanted. We would etch these, often using sugar lift, so that he could work directly, i.e. a black brush stroke would etch as a black mark. Once etched we would print samples off and when he came back he would either discard or ask us to adjust tonality or texture etc. each time he came in he was surprised by what we were able to get out of the plates, this including of course the differences made by selective hand wiping. Even if you think you know a process well, a master printmaker will know the process in more depth because he or she will be working not only every day on the process, but with a wide variety of artists, each one demanding a new and different approach to the task. Working with another person can be really rewarding, a symbiotic relationship can build up between you and one person begins to instinctively know what the other wants. This is for me the time when printmaking really does become a space for invention and discovery.

Eleanor Morgan in her presentation ‘Fixing the ephemeral: the materiality of sand drawings’ introduced the concept of drawings as a form of communication that didn’t necessarily need any resultant record. This is very like speaking it would seem to me, when I’ve said something, unless someone has a voice recorder, it’s gone without trace.

Morgan was interested in salvage anthropology and notions of preservation.  The anthropologist ArthurBernard Deacon had during his visit to Malekula and the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) recorded the famous sand drawing tradition for which the islands are still renowned. The material he collected from the individuals he interviewed is of great value to the people of the islands of Vanuatu who are eager to retain knowledge of their heritage, and his recording is detailed and unique. Deacon’s portrayal of a culture without an extensive written history is of importance to all of us as it asks questions about humans and their cultures and whether or not we value difference or accept constant change.

A modern day Vanuatu sand drawing

We were asked to try and copy one of the drawings and it was very difficult, but as you did it you were able to grasp its underlying symmetry and I thought that given a few goes the patterns could be mastered. The issue though was about performance and the importance of specialist knowledge. As these drawings were made their maker would be responding to secret knowledge and although this was a common language, the story would include certain private thoughts. This was about the transmission of knowledge and not the preservation of objects. In effect for me, it was about story telling. Deacon’s diagrams of the sand drawings don’t include much information as to what they tell. Snippets of information were available, such as the fact that the direction of the making of the lines formed a ghost pass to the lambi. (Not sure what this means, but it sounded fascinating).

I was interested in how many different things these drawings are supposed to represent; they are “mnemonic devices to record and transmit rituals, mythological lore and oral information about local histories, cosmologies, kinship systems, song cycles, farming techniques, architectural and craft design, and choreographic patterns. Most sand drawings possess several functions and layers of meaning: they can be “read” as artistic works, repositories of information, illustration for stories, signatures, messages or objects of contemplation."

This seemed to me to be a rich set of meanings and opened out much food for thought. How were stories embedded in these patterns, how much was in the telling and how much in the pattern?

I was particularly interested because my own work involves stories and as my drawings evolve different aspects of stories come into focus. I have been working with a 360 degree specialist photographer to think about how I can control the way my images are seen on screen and now realise I have to think more about the performative aspect of my work.

Morgan mentioned Alfred Gell a few times as an anthropologist who had picked up on these issues. I have referred to Gell before because of his work on traps; his book, ‘Art and Agency’ is a classic study and it really helped me to think about what it is that artists do.

The golden orb weaver spider exists on Vanuatu and their webs are collected to make spiritual fabrics that can be made into costumes.  As their webs are made they are stretched between trees, large and strong enough to trap birds, but delicate enough to suggest hard mist. As their wearers disappear under the layers of web fabric, new meanings for their lives are discovered, their spiritual nature emerges as their physical body is erased. The spider’s web and the sand drawings both perform disappearing acts that are central to a story about cultural meaning. In our society we tend to erect monuments to significant meaning, statues, books or long running TV shows, but on Vanuatu significant meaning seems to have been encoded in the ephemeral and perhaps because of that teaches us a lesson about our own hubris and reminds us of the power of suggestion and old stories and to not put our faith in making larger and more physical art objects. An issue that I felt was personally very pertinent, as I had only the month before been over to the Venice Biennale and had had to evaluate my feelings after seeing a lot of grandiose and very expensive artist’s productions

One of Deacon's photographs of a spiderman

Phil Sawdon then followed this by presenting a very personal exposition of his own working process, ‘…feel my way…outline judgements…I made some pictures’.

Sawdon talked about his ambiguous practice that was concerned with the drawing together of aggregates within a conceptual space. This was his way of intertwining theory and practice, the talk itself being a pause which could enable both himself ad us to see the theory that was driving the work. Because his work is serial in nature, this was his methodology, one piece of work always leads to another. This was the central issue for me, both as a practitioner and as an art educator. How does one thing lead to another? Is it that we see a mistake in a piece of work and in the next one try to rectify it? Is it to do with the fact that we become obsessed by collecting together all the possible variations of a theme, those of us that collected trade cards in their youth, now making new sets of images that explore all the variations we can? Is it to do with making a series of experiments, each one perhaps helping us to approach an idea of truth? Whatever it is, one thing leads to another, or as Jasper Johns would say, “It's simple, you just take something and do something to it, and then do something else to it. Keep doing this, and pretty soon you've got something”.

Deanna Petherbridge’s “finding, refining reformulating and questioning” is cited as one way to think about drawing as a serial process. (If you want to dig deeper into this read Phil’s paper ‘What shall I draw?’ in Drawing the Process edited by Jo Davies and Leo Duff)

Sawdon had also been looking at Rhoda Kellogg’s work on children’s drawings, (search for her archive on children’s drawings, there are some wonderful ones to look at) he asks himself questions as to why and how he is making decisions and interestingly using creative writing techniques to interrogate his practice, rather than the widely accepted more academic writing conventions. Again this was useful to experience, because this more performative presentation was for me welded to the process of creation, closer to the poet Yates’ assertion that “I made it out of a mouthful of air.” Sawden wonders whether we have an inborn preference for balance and regularity and as his images evolve he revisits them and begins to ‘fill them in’, further evolving their forms into more ‘graphic’ poster like representations. He uses new technology to do this, Photoshop rather than Illustrator and states that, “These works are intended for private viewing.” An interesting assertion to make in front of an audience. So is it the performance in front of the projected images of the drawings that is intended for public consumption? Is this another example of sand drawings, their physical existence doesn’t matter, but the stories that they enable do?

Phil is someone that likes a joke, his fictional museum allows him to have his cake and crumble it; he lives in his own world, acts the clown and plays with words and his audience. Or at least it feels like that, the fact he has retired makes me realise I could retire too and would the consequences be that I would revisit myself as a man with his tongue stuck firmly in his own cheek?

Always an interesting speaker, Sawdon's presentation was a good one to end the first day on.

Phil mentioned the fukt magazine during his talk, its well worth a look at it.

Day two

2018 conference notes