Drawing : A linear enjambement

Rosemarie McGoldrick: 'Animalcules IV' (2025)

An enjambement in verse is the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line. For instance the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams, is constructed in such a way that everything depends upon a continuation of the first line, therefore the first line ends without punctuation, so that the thought continues into the next line; thus creating a sense of flow.

William Carlos Williams
XXII from Spring and All (1923)

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The Red Wheelbarrow is a short haiku like poem that makes us aware of how objects work upon our personal sense of a visual poetry.

The line that continues is also something that can be purely visual. Rosemarie McGoldrick has an exhibition of her work on at the Centre for Recent Drawing at the moment and she uses a sense of enjambement in her drawn images depicting microscopic forms of imagined plankton and geometric krill. She is another example of an artist trying to visualise the invisible and I was particularly interested in her work because of the idea of enjambement. When I was looking at permeable boundaries, such as the ones that surround an amoeba, I was trying to visualise how the body of the amoeba was open and flexible, becoming at times part of the surrounding environment and at other times seeming to reassert itself, switching from one state to another. I saw in McGoldrick's images a possibility of a type of visual language using a linear enjambement, that could allow me to redraw microscopic and human sized forms in such a way that they were interconnected much more clearly into their environment and to each other. It also fitted very well with my earlier thoughts about lines as symbols of invisible forces.

Relationships between bacteria, feelings, their human hosts and other things

Lines of relationship are constantly shifting and when trying to visualise an embodied complex of interoceptual feelings, some areas are just blank. In the image above the black blobs were drawn as indicators of unknowns that still have complex relationships between all the other aspects of a being situated in an environment. One issue I have also had to think about in these type of images is how power is depicted. I have been looking towards the depiction of what is sometimes called a 'flat ontology' or sets of equal relationships between things. However I'm also aware that as soon as we focus on something it has more power in our minds over other things, that then move into the background as we shift our attention away from them. For instance in the image above the form moving into the frame from the left hand side is weightier than the more complex form situated in the middle of the image. The connections between are though drawn as if they are of equal weight. Perhaps my thoughts can be clarified by referring to another image that uses similar lines to depict a relationship.

Mesmerism

The invisible power of mesmerism is represented in the image above as another example of a male exerting power over a female. However I'm more interested in the lines of force being rather like the strings attached to a puppet.

Although the hand of the puppeteer is usually thought of as a means of control and the strings the means by which that control is asserted, you can see it as being a relationship that goes both ways, the puppet in effect also directs the puppeteer. Connections go both ways.

It is however Jorinde Voigt's use of lines to express relationships that I reference in my own drawings, as her images are reflections upon the transience of experience and the impossibility of actually recording it. In her drawings I see a glimpse of Cézanne's struggle to draw how he saw; as in Cézanne, there is a beauty in Voigt's work that emerges in relation to her seeking to pinpoint life's ever changing patterns.

Jorinde Voigt

The drawings that were on display at this year's Turner Prize exhibition by Nnena Kalu were also a type of linear enjambement. In her case the drawings were all repeated, the continuation of the sentence beyond the end of a line, being accomplished by picking up a swirling linear thought and doubling it. Her drawings seem very much about her own energy, about her body's movement and a celebration of it. Although related in form to some of Voigt's drawings, Kalu's feel less of an emotional dilemma, more a celebration of her existence than a struggle to affirm it.

Nnena Kalu

Nnena Kalu's doubling reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg's Factum 1 and 2.

Robert Rauschenberg: Factum 1 and 2: 1957

Factum 1 and Factum 2 are nearly identical, both using the same mixed-media techniques, of collage and paint on canvas. Rauschenberg's doubling, is this case is more a commentary on art's originality and uniqueness, paint never dripping in exactly the same way, every abstract expression being an original feeling. However the style of collage next to free paint marks, makes each 'combine' out to be a 'unique' Rauschenberg. Nnena Kalu's drawings are similar in that they are not exact copies, but close enough to at first sight be seen as identical doubles. Rauschenberg's approach being more cerebral, whilst I feel Kalu has found her way more instinctively. All of these attempts to meditate on the nature of the creative act involve in one way or another the continuation of a communication beyond an initial setting out of what is to be communicated. They are like hair extensions, attached to the starting point, but going much further, becoming something new in the process.

Jorinde Voigt drawing as abstraction and metaphor

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines

The emotional line

A straight line