Jorinde Voigt: Drawing as abstraction and notation

Jorinde Voigt

Jorinde Voigt is a German artist whose practice centres around drawing as a way to document process. In her case she began as a photographer and then decided to see if she could document the process of thinking about how she thought about the dynamics of image selection. She had memories of musical notation which helped her to think about how to develop a language to describe how she understood certain experiences. For instance when we look at an image our eyes scan from one area of the image to another. These movements take place whether we are looking at the world or another artwork or reading a text. We constantly scan for information and for Voigt this process underlies how we construct meaning from the chaos of existence. As she draws she often uses technical drawing instruments, such as Rapidographs, rulers, French curves, compasses and set squares. The repeated lines and annotations often build a complex matrix reminiscent of contemporary music annotation mixed with diagrams of complex electrical circuitry. 

Jorinde Voigt

Recently Voigt has begun to add more colour and cuts into her papers, as well as adding cutout shapes, allowing her to build a further layer of associations into the images. 

Jorinde Voigt

In the image above it is much easier to see the influence of musical notation on her drawing and the image below is of a more recent drawing with colour inserts. You could think of these drawings as conceptual abstraction. She is trying to in effect develop a visual score that is a personal notation of her responses to situations. 

Jorinde Voigt

Voigt has spoken about her work on video and in order to get a proper idea of how she works and why she does the things she does follow the links below. 

Jorinde Voigt 1
Jorinde Voigt 2
Jorinde Voigt 3

Find examples of experimental musical notation here.

If interested in this area of drawing and musical notation there are useful links in my earlier post on Eye Music.

Compare her drawings with those of Daniel Libeskind. 

Diagram of electrical circuitry 

The diagram of electrical circuitry above points to the fact that what Voigt is doing is something that is common to any activity or way of thinking that needs to focus on one thing at a time in order to understand what's going on. If an electrical engineer became distracted by anything else except the electrical circuit, he or she would begin to lose track of what is already a complexity that most of us could not follow. A diagram allows us to abstract out of the world's infinite complexity a particular aspect that we are interested in. The art is in the invention of a language that helps to explain what is happening. 

John Coltrane. Untitled (circle of fifths), 1967

See also:

Abstraction and non figurative drawing

Drawing and data visualisation