Monday 16 May 2016

Drawing and Mona Hatoum

This weekend I managed to get to see the Mona Hatoum exhibition at Tate Modern. This is a wonderful show and is central to how contemporary artists use drawing. In particular Hatoum uses a wide variety of approaches to drawing to visualise her ideas, from sketches for ideas all the way through to the physical actualisation of her concepts. These are a few of her approaches but once again remember it's best to go and see these things in the flesh, so if you can get down to London it's on until the 21st of August 2016.
 
Impenetrable 2009 




'Impenetrable' consists of hanging metal rods that have had the twists of barbed wire added, so it looks as if this is straightened barbed wire. Once again the grid format is used to give coherence to the form, this time by floating the 'cube' of verticals you get the sense of a space that is on the one hand 'Impenetrable' but on the other hand it is very ephemeral, hovering ghost like in space. This is essentially a 3D visualisation of vertical lines in space and reads as a 3D drawing, rather than as a sculpture dealing with mass.

Light Sentence




'Light Sentence' again reads as a 3D drawing this time using shadows to give kinetic excitement and mood to the space. She has a dangling light bulb at the centre of this piece, (again the wire mesh lockers gain coherence because of the grid format), the bulb is attached to a live wire that is itself raised and lowered very slowly, ensuring that the shadows are constantly changing and therefore as a viewer you are always slightly off balance, unsettled by never being able to establish a fixed point of reference. This is a very powerful piece, but in essence it is again a 3D visualisation of a drawn grid. Of course the actual material associations make for a far more complex read than a pencil drawing and the inescapable references to wire cages are vital to its reception. Again though I would argue that this is someone who thinks through drawing, even though her final pieces are material led.

Undercurrent (red) 2008




'Undercurrent' continues Hatoum's obsession with live electric cables. Electric wires are fascinating as they hold a vital current, an invisible energy that is powerful enough to kill if handled. She uses the cables as if using threads in a weaving, (again a metaphor that has been mentioned a lot in this blog), and shows us the effect of the hidden electrical current by attaching light bulbs that dim and fade as the current oscillates. The red covering of the cabling is also vital to the read as well as the way the cables open out from a very formal central weave as they stretch out towards the light bulbs that form an edge around the piece.

Homebound (2000)




'Homebound' is an earlier example of Hatoum's fascination with electric currents. This time everything was placed behind a tautly strung wire fence, this itself being another metaphor, the wires acting as a boundary beyond which the audience can’t pass. Homebound links a wide range of domestic objects together with electrical cabling and we can see that they are live because light bulbs are inserted into objects that glow as the current throbs through the installation. The wires linking things together are lines of connection, again this is a drawing concept.

Present Tense 1996

 



Another obsession of Hatoum's is the map. She revisited maps several times in this show, and once again I have often pointed out how maps are central to the way that drawing can be used to visualise our world. 'Present Tense' uses soap made out of olive oil and the map itself is drawn by pushing into the soap thousands of tiny glass beads that are often worn by Palestinian women. The soap is again a carefully chosen material, it being one of the products manufactured only by Palestinian workers in this heavily contested, politically charged area of the world.

Handmade paper map




Her handmade paper maps are very subtle. We have looked at papermaking before as an area much underused. In this case she has used a stencil to give form to the shape of the continents. This is hard to control but quite straightforward once you are set up to make your paper. The end product leaves a gap or space where in this case the continents would be, therefore asking a question as to how solidly each landmass can be associated with a particular idea of territory.

Neon Globe

The neon globe carries the idea on further, the fact that you can see through the globe again undermining the idea of fixed territories, the neon lines merging and mixing to create new continents as you walk past the work. Once again though, this is about line, line as a boundary, line as an edge and line as a mapping device. 

+ and -


'Plus and Minus' is all about erasure. As the work is drawn it erases itself. A wonderful metaphor for creation in destruction and of course related to the idea of how we draw by marking surfaces and erasing these marks as we proceed to develop new images.

Rubbing on stiff tracing paper
 
Hatoum's rubbings on stiff easily crinkled tracing appear to leave ghosts of images without actually having to use any applied rubbing materials. The image is revealed as the paper is broken and 'whitened' by the way light is reflected off the broken paper surface. She also pricks holes into areas where there is a hole in the object beneath. The grey is made by the light coming through the untreated areas of the paper's surface. This is all about investigating the properties of paper and then finding an appropriate use for it.

Sketchbook page
Finally there is Hatoum's use of sketchbooks and scraps of paper on which she tries out ideas. Her performances and projection pieces are first of all realised as sketchbook drawings, these are not at all 'finished' but clear enough to give an idea of what can be done. If you look at the page above it is crammed with information as to how this piece will work, she used drawing as a vital thinking tool, and I would suggest that without drawing she would find it very difficult to do the things she does.
Hopefully this is a reminder of how important it is to think of drawing as an extended practice, it is both something that can be practiced in a traditional way and a discipline that is now capable of standing alongside any other practice. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, go and see the exhibition yourself and make your own mind up, but as a drawing student try and think about how her approach could both ask you questions about how you yourself are responding to the events you are living through and whether or not you can open your ideas up to a much wider range of approaches to drawing both conceptually and materially.

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