Drawing across disciplines: Day 3

Day three began again with parallel sessions, I attended the four sessions presented under the umbrella of HYBRID KNOWING SPACES BETWEEN ART & SCIENCE. 

1. Felicity Clear: Drawing the atmosphere

Felicity Clear was based in Ireland and had been studying tides, winds and other elements that go towards our understanding of weather. The interrelationship between all these elements was very fluid and there were particular visual rhythms that could be discovered to underpin these relationships. In order to further her interest in this area she had signed up for scientific courses on the weather and weather systems. We were introduced to the Coriolis effect, a force that causes the deflection of circulating air due to the Earth's rotation. This major factor in weather patterns, controls the direction of winds and causes them to deflect to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Coriolis effect

She had become fascinated by the various ways that weather could be visualised. One particular archive she had been looking at, held the beautiful watercolour images drawn up by a French meteorologist/artist, of clouds, which were produced during the time of the first world war. Weather forecasting was at the time vital to the prediction of how poison gas would disperse, or of how troops could move. Wind direction and its speed, as well as knowing whether or not rain was due, would influence strategic command decisions as to future actions. This was also the case in relation to the British army.  I by chance also found a wonderful weather resource that could be used here. The resources Felicity was uncovering, combined observational visualisation techniques with data visualisation, in effect fusing art and science into one discipline. 

She had even constructed her own weather observation station, in order to look at how the measurements could be both collected and visualised. 

I was very taken by a simple way to measure degrees along a horizon line. You simply use your extended arm's clenched fist as a sextant, and you can use it to measure the height of the moon, star, or planet above the horizon. A clenched fist, when held at yours arm's full extension will roughly measure off 10-degrees; you can therefore use your fist to make a reasonable guesstimate of degrees either horizontally or vertically.

All the various ways to visualise weather data rely on the concept that you need to simplify a complex phenomena, in order to be able to measure it. Which is interesting, in that it presupposes that in the process of simplification, there are no important changes. In fact approaches to measurement can be read as a media specificity issue, because as you measure you are actually shaping what is being measured. Felicity then pointed out that the interesting issue here was that art could be used to render visible that which was not normally visible. This phrase had now been used several times by various speakers, including myself when I introduced the purpose of my workshop and I wondered if as we began to sum up what we had discovered during the conference, whether this aspect of drawing, as a tool for revealing the invisible forces that surround us, would be foregrounded. 

She then went on to show how her own work used this type of data and its representation. 

Wind speed and direction data on a stick plot

For instance she had used charcoal to plot wind speed and direction using a stick plot, similar to the one above. The charcoal of course adding a soft sensibility as it was worked, something that begins to change the plotting into something that reflects the hand in action, rather than a machine measuring data. Long lengths of tracing paper had been drawn on to visualise certain flows of weather movement and these drawings were then hung in a space that had air movements that made the drawings slightly quiver whilst they were being exhibited. 

Felicity Clear: Exhibition view

In another exhibition elastic tape was used to extend drawings out into the space within which they were being exhibited, so that the work began to move between diagrammatic form and 3D installations. She began adding imaginary marks to drawings that also included observational data, fusing the two ways of being into one totality. Folding, flow and contour were now all becoming central to the way she was thinking about moving the work forward, the imaginary and the measured were now fused together in one understanding, something that seemed to echo what had happened in the world of quantum mechanics, whereby it was well understood that observation itself could affect results. The old divide between scientific objectivity and artistic subjectivity being something that drawing seems to be able to step right across. What had begun as a movement towards a more scientific way of thinking about visualising the weather, was now moving into a poetic phase. 

2. Lúcia Antunes: Scientific illustration: A learning journey through drawing 

Lúcia Antunes: Scientific illustrations of a bat

Lúcia is a scientific illustrator and communication designer and this fusion of professions was vital. Her work could not exist without the full collaboration of scientists and other specialists and she described it as, 'the visual representation of science' and that she was always concerned with helping to explain.  It was pointed out that Pedro Salgado had raised the profile of scientific illustration in Portugal and that he, like all other important scientific illustrators was involved in establishing the conventions of visual communication within the discipline. These were needed in order to maintain a uniformity of presentation and a mutual understanding. For instance the orientation of subjects or way to display anatomical parts are often standardised, or the use of an outline for clarification purposes even though there isn’t a line around an actual subject, or the removal of certain anatomical parts for simplification, or to make the shading of drawings concurrent with an imaginary principal light source placed at the upper left corner. These principles, (some of which I have remembered from when I was having to do some work in a related area), can though from my experience, also become a straightjacket and I was interested to hear that she felt my workshop session had been of value, as it highlighted both the need for focus groups in order to test out communication, and the fact that working together with others can be a way to re-inject visual invention into the process. 

This did raise an issue for me in terms of ownership of copyright. If an image is truly a joint development, who owns the copyright, should it be a joint ownership, or because the artist would have the final say over how the image would look, should it always be the artist? I well remember my time working as an illustrator and the client would often make sure the copyright stayed with them, even though what I finally produced for them was an original piece of visual thinking. The client's argument was both that they were paying for my work and that I was working to illustrate their concept. 

Lúcia pointed to the need for continuous testing to allow for dialogue between all parties, as well as the need to observe and not merely see. 

She produced both illustration and design work, which was for her a continuous or seamless strategy, as it allowed for knowledge exchange to lie at the centre of her practice. She was involved with a programme that was centred around literacy in science and health. Again this chimed with the work I had been doing and I thought the images she showed us were excellent examples of communication design as well as of scientific illustration. I was also interested in the fact that she used a far greater graphic freedom when designing book covers or materials for certain pamphlets. This layering of approach in relation to audiences was intriguing, especially as I was beginning to think about how I could work with a medical illustrator. At this point I began thinking about two plant leaves, sitting where the lungs are in the body, thinking that the image could be used as an illustration of how closely linked plants and people are in terms of their genetic code and their respective needs to breathe. 

Lúcia finally reminded us of how the processes involved in visual communication allowed us to pass on knowledge in a structured way, and she asked us a question; how do we search for knowledge using visual communication tools? 

I was left reflecting on the fact that so many of us working in the visual field are siloed. Fine artists rarely working with graphic designers to clarify their ideas, communication designers always working to communicate various clients needs, but rarely being commissioned to use their skills to help other artists. Having worked as an industrial interior designer, illustrator, printmaker, sculptor and as a drawing led fine artist, I am happy to use skills developed in my various areas of previous work, but I think we could all become far more strategic in the way our various visualisation skills could be harnessed and how we could perhaps work more in collaboration. Perhaps if we were simply called visualisation specialists and that we were seen as visual problem solving professionals, then our skills might be appreciated more by other professions. What Lúcia's work demonstrates is that she has the skills to on the one hand clarify for science professionals what they are looking at and at the same time have the skills to develop a communication strategy to enable general principles to be understood by non science audiences. I'm sure she also has the skills to open out the poetic possibilities of the situation as well. 

3. Maria Strecht Almeida: Abel Salazar's explorations of the Golgi area in mammalian cells, or when staining and drawing converge

We were introduced to the work of Abel Salazar, a man who stated, "The one who only knows about Medicine, does not even know about Medicine." Which sort of summed up his approach to the integration of art and science. Stain technology was used by Salazar as a method to help understand both structure and function of cellular life. Maria's presentation was again visually very interesting and my notes are perhaps more visually informative than textually clear. 

The small drawing above from my notebook was an attempt to note down the structure of the Golgi area, it was actually presented as an image more like the one immediately below. 

I was fascinated by this image, which was why I had made a drawn note of it, and have since looked into it again, as it reminded me of Ruyler's diagrams in his book 'The Genesis of Living Forms'. The folding of the Alps was compared with the folding of flat metal sheet, which was in turn compared to the folding of cells during the process of embryogenesis. This appeared to be another example of this process.

Excerpts from my notebook

Salazar used tannin and iron solutions to dye cells, in particular we were shown how he had used the technique to draw the organelle, a sub-cellular structure that has one or more specific jobs to perform in the cell, much like an organ does in the body. Tannin and iron solutions are chemical compositions not unlike oak gall ink, which I have made myself in the past and it also uses iron together with a tannin solution. Tannin and iron can be used together to create a range of colours, from brown to slate to light black, it provides a structure for the iron to bond to. Maria reminded us that artistic colour mixing and scientific staining are parallel worlds, something that I have touched upon myself in the occasional blog post. 

Maria showed us a very neat diagram, (in the image directly above), that showed a circular form divided into 4. It demonstrated a movement from a photographic representation, bottom right to a drawn clarification. As you moved around the circle, the next three images after the photograph, each represented a further layer of clarification, and they were all drawings. The clockwise moving arrow I drew represents a move towards greater and greater abstraction. She talked about the power of images to convince us of reality and that a move away from the image as product (ownership) to the image as process (understanding) was required. 

This presentation reminded me of the gradual development of the media's public image of the corona virus and of how important a sequencing of images was to the understanding of process. 

4. Mariana Sousa: Understanding the inside to draw the outside: The history of artistic anatomy in Lisbon

Mariana explained that there has been a long partnership between the Medical-Surgical School and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Lisbon. Students from both schools came together in the Anatomical Theatre of Lisbon for the observation, study, and copying of the human cadaver. From this collaboration arose the University of Lisbon's collection of anatomical drawings, dating from the first half of the 20th century.

An image from the collection

As we looked at anatomical drawings I was reminded that the flow of muscles over bones, was similar in structure to the flow of water over rocks, or air around solid objects. The revealing of the inside of the body is of course sometimes associated with flaying and I couldn't get that image of a flayed man holding his own skin out of my head.

This image wasn't shown

We were reminded of the need for the body to be prepared for dissection and that there was a need for the drawing of the expressive nature of the body as well as its internal structure. (In this case I was reminded of the work of Messerschmidt.) 

There is a painting by Carlos Bonvalot entitled 'The Master' (1914), The painting depicts an Anatomy lesson taught by Professor Henrique de Vilhena, at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon. His presence ensured the traditional training in anatomy continued for many years but on his retirement, there was no one to replace him. 

Finally we were left with a sort of question, Mariana stated that there had been a "removal of harmful elements from the collection," and I wanted to know what this meant. Bad drawings? Incorrect drawing? Drawings with pornographic potential? Perhaps a more intriguing question than its possible answer. 

After a coffee break we had a practice sharing session, held in my case under the overarching term, 'Drawing along'. 

Junuka Deshpande: A drawing hangs in the middle

To get to this session we walked down to the 'pink house', a short walk that took us past the huge fallen tree that occupied the space outside of the studios in which we had been working. This tree had been preserved as it had been the tree around which the building we were in had been designed. It was now host to a wonderful variety of fungi and was a spectacular and wonderful thing to have been preserved. 

Junuka's practice had developed out of work she was doing with Indian women and was a project that explored the observation of a crossroad/underpass through drawings. We were told that in India the flyover under which they were working, was a symbol for modernity. The drawings are made from the same place over 30 days. 

A sequence of Junuka's images demonstrating a move towards greater abstraction

The drawings began as very figurative reportage, but gradually they became more abstract as they began to use the materials of the site as elements in the drawings' own making. The drawings made becoming an embodied exercise. We were presented with examples of the drawings made, as well as small piles of earth, samples of rubble, sand etc. The drawings were collected together in format type, ranging from observations to material responses. We were also shown a film, which had a soundtrack composed of sounds recorded from the streets where the work was being done. This was particularly evocative. 

The last section of drawings documented examples of close observations of micro spaces and crevices and it felt as if the drawings needed to finally be placed back into the ground out of which they emerged. As Junuka was also a filmmaker, I thought there was much potential in the moving of the idea on into either a filmed installation, animation or even a more comprehensive film that documented the whole process. 

Junuka's presence was in this case essential to the reception of the work and I would have liked to have seen her 'leading' the idea, perhaps as a talking head, in a film. 

After lunch the keynote session for the day was held. 

Gemma Anderson-Tempini: Interdisciplinary methods:Artistic research and public art

Gemma presented two projects, the first was focused on the representation of biology as process (2017-21) and the second was focused on 'And she built a crooked house', which was a project that I had seen when it was shown in Leeds. 

Mitosis

The first block of research was focused on drawing the processes of life. She was looking at processes such as mitosis, protein folding and embryogenesis. In order to move her practice on from drawing substances to drawing processes she listed associated 'doing' words; tense, grow, align, bundle, burst etc. something that reminded me of Richard Serra's verb list for sculptural production. She needed to extract salient features from complexity. Again working with scientists in collaboration seemed to be very rewarding. 

She would use drawing to be able to ask the scientists in the lab questions. She decided that at one point she was devising a 3D score for mitosis. Working on graph paper helped, as well as folding the flat images out into 3D space. 

A series of drawings that expressed a move from fine granularity to course granularity had worked very well using the fine grid of graph paper. This was expressed in an almost dendritic form, thick lines made by joining graph paper squares, gradually got thinner and could be drawn using the next size down graph paper squares. 

The work was question and process led, but at the same time, allowing different processes to merge and diverge. 

She looked at the life cycle of haemoglobin, and collaborated with 4 scientists, using colour to represent different energy levels. Trying to follow the life of a haemoglobin molecule as it binds and unbinds with oxygen. These drawings were folded into cones and she saw a possibility of linking the forms with dance structures. She was drawing the processes of life. There is an excellent website that documents all of the work.

The crooked house project had evolved in a very different way, but was still related to her interests in visualising scientific thinking. 

She then stated that drawing shows what we know and what we don't know. Now that she had a body of work that proved that she could work in collaboration with scientists, she decided to get more involvement and sent her images to a particular scientist working in the area she was interested in, to see if he was interested in a collaboration. (This was a way of working I hadn't considered before and I began to wonder if I could do something similar)

He was interested and the two of them clicked and they made models together, as they tried to envision types of hyper-spaces, which were made of paper, so that sections could be slotted together. They looked at 'inverse vision'? and the liberation of form through this use of joining papers together. This process eventually brought her to consider knotting as a structural principle. 

She had thought about drawing as a form of proof, for example a 3, 4, 5 triangle must be at right angles, and she had also seen a relationship between pregnancy and string theory. (She has twins and the experience was resulting in some very interesting decisions being made in relation to her practice) The 10 dimensions of string theory got her thinking about models of space. In particular hypercubes. The forth dimension and non linear geometry have long been influences on modern art and one of the implications of looking out from the forth dimension is that you can see the insides of things, as if they are turned 'inside out', in a similar way to how a two dimensional object can be looked at by a three dimensional one. The implications are all played out in Abbott's 'Flatland', but her take on this was also one of a mother birthing twins. 

I had experienced the result of all this thinking as I live in Leeds and had visited the Victorian house in which was located her installation 'And she built a crooked house' twice. Each room unpacked various approaches to her thinking, from a seance being held on the top floor, via a mirror room that made you experience infinite reflections of yourself and piles of dirty washing, to a room for contemplation, whereby you could listen to a discussion on quantum theory, to a shadow room, whereby shadows of 3D hypercubes were projected on the walls. There was also hypercube wall paper and an exhibition of her drawings, whereby she had attempted to visualise the types of spaces she had been researching. 

The house was a wonderful experience and as you entered and left, in the garden you passed a climbing frame built using the principles of construction she had taken from the research. The house was a very excellent example of public art at its best. 

View of the climbing frame

Following the keynote and coffee, were the final workshop sessions. I attended a 'Drawing between' workshop.

Jasminka Letzas: Somatic drawing as boundary object 

This workshop was held around a large sheet of drawing paper, that had been taped onto the top surface of a set of tables, that had been pushed together in the centre of the room. As we entered the room, we were asked to stand next to the table, gradually filling spaces around all four sides, until we stood shoulder to shoulder all the way around it. 

Jasminka then introduced herself and her background working in therapy and began the session by getting us all to relax by scrunching our shoulders up towards our ears and then relaxing, then pulling ourselves up straight and shaking ourselves, making ourselves aware of feet and knees and how we were standing etc. Using a variety of basic exercises to remove the tension of the last three days. Everyone seemed to appreciate this approach, as it had been a very full-on conference, with one event after the other and little time to soak it all up. 

We were then all asked to write a short statement on the paper in front of us that represented what we were going to do next with what we had learnt. I wrote 'Have more conversations'. I was very aware that when I returned to England one of my first meetings was with a nurse and an anatomical illustrator from the Leeds Teaching Hospital and that it would be work that could emerge from this conversation that might indicate my next direction for practice. 

After doing this we responded to our text and had to draw what came into our minds. We were then asked to move around the table. When we stopped we had someone else's drawing in front of us and we were asked to take it a step further, in any way we chose. After doing this a few times the table top became a maze of drawings. 

We were then asked to respond to what we had done and eventually one section of the drawing was rolled and stood on its end, in order to emphasise its objectness.

The session reminded me of how important collaboration is and that as a group we were very supportive of each other. Jasminka's workshop was also a reminder of how important drawing is in the alleviation of stress and as an approach to mental well being. 

We finally reconvened and Paulo asked us all to think about how as a group we could move things forward. I asked if everyone's details could be circulated, perhaps with a  small biography, so that we could be reminded of all the interesting people we had met and be tempted to contact them to develop new initiatives. 

It was announced that on the Saturday there would be a final seminar to help draw out the implications of the conference, but I had to travel back to Leeds. 

We were left with some questions, that would hopefully be addressed during the next day's seminar.

Can the drawing skills acquired within practice-based research in the arts be transferable to other ways of knowledge production?

Can the visualisation strategies of STEM environments be transferable to artistic research as a field in its own right?

What drawing skills are transferable, meaning that we can apply them in different fields and sectors of society?

What is the potential for transferability or transformation of drawing research between STEM and Art and which drawing skills can enhance knowledge, insight, understanding and competencies?

We have skills in observation and visual recording, skills in the visualisation of the invisible, skills in the abstraction of complexity, skills in the communication of emotion and of the representation of objects in space, all of which can be applied to any area of knowledge as tools to both help with communication and to problem solve. I'm sure as a field these skills can be clustered together under the drawing umbrella. I look forward to the next steps to be taken. 

See also:

Day one

Day two

Where stains and traces meet

Stains and blots

Oak gall ink

Embodiment 

Drawing dialogue symposium

Drawing across disciplines: Day 2

Day two of the conference began with parallel sessions.

I attended the four presentations within the Drawing Across session, entitled 'Vulnerable methodologies in art and science' 

1. Chloe Masi, Gary Embury, Lucy Ward, and Anouk Mercier: Drawing as a dynamic research tool: Exploring its diverse applications and inclusive perspectives.

I had met Lucy Ward at a previous conference in Bristol, so because I had then occasionally tried to keep up with what she was working on, was to some extent aware of what was happening, especially as I had sent in a possible contribution (not accepted) to the forthcoming Bloomsbury book on drawing. Once the session got started, the first interesting issue for myself was that Gary and Lucy told us that the ideas developed out of a staff development day, and I wondered if my own institution would take such a pragmatic approach to the development of a visual research strand. I was also, in terms of institutional parallels, interested in the take up of life drawing in Bristol, as it seemed that students from university wide disciplines all found it useful. In my own institution a senior manager had banned it and although he has since left, it seems to be only the student union that keeps it going for undergraduate students. It is though not taught and the session I dropped in on, just to see how it was organised, was very poorly constructed, because there was no access to a professional tutor, who could focus the students' attention and give structure to the looking. 

The Drawing Research Group at UWE was outlined and we were shown 'Drawing Review' the publication that attempted to bring together findings from projects. (Including a drawing of myself, made when I presented at a pre-covid event) Drawing in relation to reportage and community practices was introduced, including work done with asylum seekers and we were asked to consider drawing as a tool that was particularly appropriate for working in sensitive situations. A particular drawing residency in a hospital looked to have developed some excellent practices, as it included sessions on visual thinking and diagrammatic drawing that would be attended by health care professionals as a way to enhance skills in furthering communication within their profession. For instance if a complex task was required, could a diagram or comic page type set of sequences communicate the stages needed to complete this task? Some of the issues raised were very close to the ones I was working with and I could see considerable overlap, especially in how drawing might be used to communicate type and level of pain. This was linked to the role that drawing might eventually take in the collection of data within the medical profession. Drawing it seems could have multiple roles within a clinical setting and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, which was the institution they had been working with, looks like an amazing resource for anyone interested in the arts and health. 

Finally the Bloomsbury Handbook on Drawing was introduced, an ongoing project that will attempt to collate and organise a world wide approach to what is going on within the various drawing professions and interests. A task that seemed to me Sisyphean, but one that was being spread between several people. 

2. Lucy O'Donnell: Formless

Lucy was also someone I had also met before as she used to work at York St. John University and I had given presentations there in the past and seen her previous work. She had now moved to Ireland and was making work in response to her experiences of pregnancy. I wrote, 'Little earth bound tales', whether this was a quote from Lucy or whether she was quoting someone else I'm not now sure, but it was a phrase that resonated with me, we all have these stories and they are vital to our understanding of who we are and where we fit into the various communities we find ourselves within. Lucy was using techniques of erasure to find herself through the work she was making. She was cutting the images out from old comics, leaving behind a matrix of empty pages, the various gutters between images, remaining, rather like the steel frameworks and empty window sockets of buildings that have been bombed, an image we are seeing more and more of, as wars proliferate across the world. In some frames bits of images were still left, her sensibility as to whether to cutaway or leave, gradually developing a personal narrative, out of which she had begun to re-construct her own images. She was using collage as a prompt for poetry, a resource out of which the poetic image might arrive as she constructed bodies out of comic bits. Lucy was reflecting upon several issues as she made these collages. One was the nature of being pregnant and its normality. She had been thinking through the notion of 'ableist' societies, or the discrimination and social prejudices that we can have against people with physical or mental disabilities; and how pregnancy can be something whereby it can become a disability, especially if something unexpected occurs. I was reminded of the difficulties faced by my daughter, who nearly died when she was pregnant and of how many women have had either life threatening issues to face or who have died in the past. It was however 'miscarriage' that she was asking us to consider, a pregnancy without birth. It was the relationship between the empty frame and the empty womb we were being asked to see and the need to 'give birth' to something, even if, as it was in this case, what were 'born' were fragmented bodies that were being built from the pictorial elements of the comic book pages. Images, that in turn were made from images that had been cut out of their own frames. The term, 'mother/other' suggested that as a society we do not really want to think about the mother who doesn't give birth; this being seen as abnormal, and Lucy was reminding us that as an artist she had a right to make self portraits that confronted these issues and that she would put her collages in frames chosen to remind us of the honorific values we place on the normative images usually found in this context. 

3. Philip Cabau and Maria Manuela Lopes: Mirrored experiences

We were asked to consider, body, space and time. MID Mirror Identity Drawings is a project involving students and professors from eight European universities in the arts, from very different geographical and cultural contexts. It aims to explore the subject of identity as explored through the medium of drawing. The work done so far has exposed the limitations of curriculum, especially as a range of European partners have been constructed. We were given an overview of the symposium held in May, where it seemed many of the project's themes were developed. The work will be going on line and it is hoped that drawing will become a tool for the research and understanding of identity. 

4:Veronica Cordova de la Rosa: Drawing across boundaries:Exploring creative art education in a prison setting

Veronica had been using Betty Edwards inspired drawing exercises to help structure drawing workshops held in a London prison. The prison environment was a tough one and it seemed that she had survived it due to her own background of being Mexican, and therefore prisoners who were aware of Mexican American gang subculture, gave her respect. I had worked in similar environments in Yorkshire so understood the context. I wondered if she was aware of the work of Jeremy Deller and the Koestler Award, and whether or not access routes into further education were possible for prisoners? The prison she was working in in London, seemed to be dedicated to high end security, so I suspected not. 

Workshop session

This was the session whereby I had to deliver my own workshop.

Under the umbrella title: Hybrid knowing: Spaces between art and science, I delivered a workshop entitled: Drawing the somatic body: Visual problem solving and imagineering.

It seemed to go well, but I was stressed because I only had an hour and we began 15 minutes late because people wanted to have a proper break after having to sit through 4 complex and detailed presentations. I had people working in pairs, using drawing to visualise a feeling. The session was focused on a constant interrogation of what was being produced, so that the participants could get to grips with the need to always consider the awareness and view point of others and that any difficult concept when being communicated needs to consider and work with the audience it is meant for. Participants hopefully also grasped the idea behind iterative working, i. e. by doing something again and again, and critiquing it between iterations, we can always improve it. 

After lunch the keynote speech 'Drawing in between worlds: Figuring Contingency' was delivered by Nikolaus Gansterer. 

I was really looking forward to listening to this talk because I have for a long time been following his work and he had been generous in the past when I e mailed him to see if he was happy for me to use images of his work in one of my blog posts. 

Nikolaus Gansterer's practice is one of situative notation. He explores the fundamental question of how processes of perceiving and thinking can be embodied and translated through drawing. He asks, can drawing operate as an apparatus for navigating, interacting with, and articulating the complexities of the world, particularly in moments of uncertainty and fluidity?

Nikolaus introduced us to the idea of working 'in-between worlds' and began with diagramming his thoughts. As his talk was visually stimulating, perhaps its easier to just put in pages from my notebook, to get an idea of how I recording what was being communicated. 

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Notes taken during Nikolaus Gansterer's presentation

But perhaps I had better try to translate what I understand from my notes. 

Nikolaus pointed out that he is interested in that space between the known and the unknown. His diagram, reproduced in no.1 notebook page above, showed how interest is split between the two. Because his diagrams were very physical, i. e. big drawings on the floor using chalks etc. the diagrammatic spaces made had traces of their own making. These diagrams, could be extended into 3D frameworks, and these he spoke about as having their own choreography. See page 2. 

He went on to state that he was, "diagramming new collective futures" and that his diagrams worked like scores for action. He needed to be able to point at something, to be able to put his finger on something concrete, and as he videoed his diagrams, he became more aware of certain aspects, such as lines of tension that began to exist in a more performative way. 

Thinking and drawing could be woven together but also a thought could be simply wiped away. (Page 3) Sometimes withies, (flexible willow stems) were used to extend ideas from 2D to 3D. These made the hand more central to the thinking process and furthered the process of making drawings as a hypothesis and the process led literally to 'figures of thought'. 

His study of diagrammatic images led to an index of figures, objects that sat between images and words.

He introduced the idea of drawing as a ping pong game, (or this might have been my translation, as I'm very into table tennis at the moment) drawing being interpreted by others as soon as they are produced. (Which reminded me of my workshop). Drawing can make manifest invisible things as well as observed things. Again something that I was really interested in, and which reflected my decision to scan in and publish both my observational and imaginative sketchbooks as research materials.

Sometimes he used transparent paper to develop diagrammatic ideas, as it can be folded and as you do this new relationships can immediately be seen. Like many of us at one time or another Ludwig Wittgenstein and his language games had become a driver for Nikolaus. 'Playing with Ludwig' was a reminder that Wittgenstein's notebooks are full of drawings and these are usually edited out of the text books. Nikolaus had set up drawing games (note 4), whereby computations, scores and instructions could be developed as elements of the language of games. It was interesting to reflect and to rethink how LWs language games had made me think and act in the production of artwork when I was first introduced to them as a student back in 1970. The choreographic figures that were developing in the drawings shown were interesting as they were developing a particular language or sensibility that reminded me of Wittgenstein's interest in families of forms, his metaphor for sets of concepts that overlap and resemble each other. These could be actions, institutions, routines or even the development of culture itself, all of which could be at some point seen as developing languages. Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance points to the various similarities between members of a family and in this case certain marks and how they were used began to be seen by myself as Nikolaus Gansterer's family of forms. 

As the videos progressed it was easy to see that the work was centred around what were termed, "embodied diagrams". These were attempts to depict transitional flow. I was interested to see that in one performance, the fingers had been taped to drawing implements, a reminder of the performance that opened the conference. In note page 5 I noticed I had been interested in what I thought were cotton wool balls that were dotted around the emerging diagram. The surface on which the drawing was developing was black, therefore these moving dots of white, were vital punctuations, or points, that helped pin down a visual awareness of what was unfolding. His research question, was how to attend to the things of the invisible, which interestingly is almost exactly the same as the question that I have been asking myself, in relation to the visualisation of interoception. He saw his work as a movement from meaning to sensation, something that was a qualitative experience.  Drawing was at one point compared to an oceanic current, again something I am very interested in in terms of drawings ability to capture energy flow. What he was thinking about was I suggest that drawers are immersed in the world like fish are immersed in the sea and that as they move they both reflect the larger movements of the sea they swim in and at the same time create smaller movements by the actions of their own bodies, both of which are combined in the choreography of life. 

As the lecture unfolded I was becoming more and more aware of the various contingent agencies or circumstances that might surround any particular situation and that I wanted to test out the work by re-locating it into a variety of different environments or situations. What if only certain materials were available, materials that only had a very narrow mark making set of possibilities? Drawing, writing, diagramming were all swallowed up as notational forms of mark making, text being as much of a surface texture as lines or marks, his 'touch' being a unifier in the development of images that were not representations but were perhaps more like expositions or illustrations of possibilities for thought. 

The issues expounded upon were often so close to my own thinking that at times I felt as if I was swimming in my own thoughts, but Nikolaus is a far better exponent and is much more focused on what he is doing than myself and my own often far too dissipated thoughts as to how drawing can help us understand the world. 

After the coffee break there were more parallel sessions. Again I attended the four  'Vulnerable methodologies in art and science' sessions. 

1. Ans Nys: Drawing as another way of creatively working through a mourning process and finding new ways of addressing the spectator.

I was particularly interested in what she had to say about this issue, as some of my work has involved making containers for ashes after the body has been cremated. The containers are centred on the development of new rituals to help people in time of grief and mourning. For instance some of the containers I have made take the form of skimming stones, whereby the ashes are put inside a flat stone like ceramic container, and the small hole for ash insertion is then stopped up with a blob of hot sealing wax. The ritual is then centred on a group skimming session, whereby the 'stones' are skimmed off into whichever body of water seems appropriate.

Ans introduced us to the discourses surrounding melancholia and loss of empathy, in particular the discourses surrounding impoverishment and the bankruptcy of the signifier, when people are faced with death.  We were reminded of the myth associated with the first drawing, that of Butade's daughter, who drew around the outline of her lover's shadow on a wall, thus preserving his image. The myth reminds us that all is ephemeral and that the drawing may well outlast the experience from which it is taken. Ans then reminded us that Freud would in response to thinking about grief, state that, "the shadow of the object fell on the I". (I hope I got that right) or should it be “The shadow of the object fell upon the ego” a concept taken from Mourning and Melancholia, that describes the experience of a bereaved person, as one who feels as if they are in the shadow of a darkness cast over them, as if they were the moon being darkened by the shadow of the Earth. Andre Breton's poetic figure, 'Nadja' who was in real life, Léona Delcourt, kissed a piece of paper to leave a trace of her presence.  "It is me" she states, "c'est moi", her presence haunts the various narratives that thread through Breton's text, the lips' trace, another left behind ghost. I had not quite followed what was being said and the text on the second image of Nadja's lips, "et ca encore", I translated as "To become subject of one's own behaviour", which seemed to fit perfectly, but I am often running with my own narrative in these situations, so bare with me. 

 To become subject of one's own behaviour

We were introduced to Emma Hauck, a German outsider artist known for her handwritten letters to her husband while she was institutionalised in a mental hospital. The way that writing is compressed in her work, is a form of drawing and I was reminded of the work of Irma Blank and her drawn investigation of the sign that precedes the word. The phrase "Herzenschatzi komm", translates as "Sweetheart come", another projection of loss, and of how we need to deal with what is missing. 

Emma Hauck: Herzenschatzi komm

Out of this background Ans Nys had developed a practice that involved both collage and drawing, at times casting her images of hands down onto the floor, a suggestive practice that was both indicative of the broken body as a metaphor for the broken heart and as a symbol of loss. I felt she was still grieving and that the territory she was working in, if I were to enter into it, could become a trap rather than a release, but the presentation was a useful reminder of the width of human experience that drawing could encompass and provide a response to. 

2. Teresa Mayr: Worlding Hilma af Klint: An attempt at cartography.

Teresa reminded us that Hilma af Klint's work was really to be seen within a chapel devoted to its presence. Hilma af Klint was interested in developing states of the unconscious whilst drawing, (automatic drawing) and that she had moved in the spiritualist circles of that time. I was interested in the issues surrounding the possibilities of immersing oneself into an image and how the images worked as both signs and as 'temples' or arenas out of which one could emerge transformed. This was image making looking for or searching for a very old feeling or sensibility. Her images can be huge and the scale of the gaze is something we can sometime ignore. In Teresa Mayr's imagination, the "Paintings for the Temple" are pictorial birth canals. Abstract forms bud and change constantly in exchange with the universe, jump back into figuration and oscillate symbolically between macrocosm and microcosm. 

We were asked to think of Hilma af Klint's images as clairvoyant views of possible futures, futures that Teresa seeks to expand and extend with her drawings. 

The whole edifice of research methodology was questioned as a patriarchal construction, (something that I also see as having problems related to class too), and we were asked to go beyond logical macho-science and embrace embodied processes of thought and imagination, 

3, Joana Maria Pereira: Peasants have no skills for drawing: Drawing from the autobiographical narrative and other places.

We were reminded of the importance of grandmothers. One without sight, without reading or writing, was still operating as a significant figure, and how could this be? What is it like to be in that position? Historically we all emerge from the land, some are more aware of this as being more recent, but all of us if we can go far enough back are the products of particular landscapes. All of us are in our various ways, holders of history. How can drawing relate us to our pasts? As the 'underdog of art' it can perhaps escape the charge of elitism, and be a more democratic medium, that therefore can be used to cut through class differences. Simple drawing materials can be used, we can draw on floors or walls, and these materials can be given life by our engagement with them. The gesture and the act are what energises the work, but gestures can too much and perhaps we need to try to say less and to consider inactivity as a critique. Hesitation (again) and inactivity, negation, not making, all of which may be used to state a case. Can drawing be used to address social inequality? Can drawing be used as a mediator between the individual and the world? These were questions that really struck home, as my own work is often used as part of a conversation between myself and others and I have taken up this way of working because I firmly believe that as an artist I can be that conduit that helps others realise their potential. 

4. Angélica María Zorrilla and Lila Insúa Lintridis: Scale of gaze: Drawn conversation to knot silences, breaths, pulsions

We were introduced to the work of Angélica María Zorrilla a Colombian artist, and Lila Insúa Lintridis an artist from Madrid, who were now working together.

Angélica María Zorrilla

We were asked to think about how we face the unknown, that there is a 'line of silence', something that made me think of how art could be made on the moon. To consider a culture that was neither East nor West and that was non-binary. We were asked to think of other voices, ones that might be used to trace, to trim or to dilute and to think about 'hesitation' as a way to take up a position. For instance if you have two poetic descriptions of something, do you take them on board one at a time, or both at the same time? What if we use our left hand? The left was seen as taking up a position of 'otherness', I was reminded that in English the word 'sinister' is derived from the Latin for the 'left side'. We were asked to consider diachronic, non linear thinking. 

Their work was about an encounter, something in-between the drawn and the written. We were asked to think of the performative aspects of drawing. The kipu or knot form being vital to the meeting of two minds, including traces, marks, ritual inscriptions as well as “the lines of wandering with beautiful delight”, all acting to achieve some form of synchronism between two people.

Although the presentation was about two people working together, it was the work of Angélica María Zorrilla, that chimed with myself, and looking at her work set me off wondering about my own approach to making work and how I had operated when trying to work in collaboration. 

I'm afraid I was then off on my own track, thinking about the languages of spiders, going back into animist concerns, how to listen to the ground on which we walk and of how when using drawing as a form of materialist thinking, we can negotiate with the world by developing forms of sympathetic magic. I was also reminded of the vitalist movement and yet again this was another session that had fired me up to want to get straight back to finishing the drawings I have been involved with making recently. 

My own recent work

I didn't feel that the round table contributed anything new to the discussion, simply confirming that there was much to chew on and that we had had a very long day, full of exciting material which we hadn't yet had time to digest.  The round table was followed in the evening by a conference dinner, which gave everyone a chance to relax and catch up with some of the people we had yet to manage to have conversations with. 

See also:

Day one

Day three

The embodied diagrams of Nikolaus Gansterer

The diagram as art and spirit guide

Irma Blank