Drawing: 'A protest against forgetting'

My chapter for the publication 'Body, Space and Place in Collective and Collaborative Drawing: Drawing Conversations 2', engages in the book’s overall aims to consider the interrelationship between body, space, place and the drawing process, exploring the idea of the body as conduit between interior and exterior in the act of making, and to extend research into the area of drawing practice. My practice-based research explored how two widely differing experiences of Icelandic landscapes, examined through the employment of contrasting drawing processes, brought new insights into the relationship between actual and virtual encounters with the landscape and the effect this had upon the making of marks, pushing the boundaries of image creation in relation to landscape through the particular medium of drawing –particular, because of drawings ability to ‘assert the fully extended history and processes of its own making, unlike the self obscuring layers of the painterly project’ (Petherbridge). New insights were mined through the marks or gestures adopted in each project, suggestive of these differing encounters, resulting in refreshed and new methods of depicting landscape through drawing. There is also an exploration of the relationship in these projects between drawing and memory. The discussion is prompted and informed by a notion of Hans Ulrich Obrist, who talked of the act of painting being ‘a protest against forgetting’. (Obrist wrote about painting but I argued that his points could be extended to drawing.) Also considered are thoughts of John Berger when he described drawing’s particular ability to challenge ‘disappearance’. In a detailed discussion, which drew upon some ideas of Uriel Orlow, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Geoffrey Batchen, and Susan Sontag, there was an exploration of how, in taking the webcam images and transforming them into drawings, the works began to resist ‘photography’s ability to fix an image in time.’ [Sontag].