The edges of drawings and things

I gave a talk recently to the Drawing Research Network, it was their 2025 conference entitled: 'Drawing Negation: Emergence' and was part of an online symposium. 

This is how my talk was introduced in the blurb that advertised what was going to be delivered:

Garry Barker’s presentation, 'The Emergence of Distinction in the Visualisation of Interoception: Drawing as a Boundary-Making Act', will explore the parallels between the inception of drawing as a distinction between one thing and something else, the evolution of human territoriality, and the conceptualisation of the universe’s origin. It argues that during workshops designed to help participants visualise interoceptual experiences; that it became important to develop an understanding of drawing as a primary act of distinction. Defining a somatic feeling is linked to the introduction of fundamental mathematical logic and biological processes observed in nature. By examining the philosophical underpinnings of Spencer-Brown’s 'Laws of Form' alongside the evolutionary context of boundary-making in animals, and the visualisation of embodied thinking through drawing, this presentation seeks to articulate how drawing reflects an intrinsic human impulse to mark territory and create meaning from the void of our own bodies.

The presentation posits the significant parallels between the moment a drawing begins, the territorial nature of human and animal existence, and our understanding of the inception of the universe itself and that the mark making that lies at the centre of the act of drawing, is in its most elemental form, a distinction-making process.

Using images made in response to the visualisation of interoceptual experiences, alongside images of mathematical set theory and animal territorial marking, the presentation will unfold relationships that are designed to illustrate how an evolution of signalling, from unicellular organisms to human art forms, reflects an intrinsic animal as well as material need to mark distinctions as we attempt to articulate our existence within the universe.

Reading the introduction again after a few weeks makes me cringe, but the core of what I was going to talk about is there. I was trying to get at some sort of ontological core, an attempt to look at what underlies certain types of abstract thinking and to suggest that deep down underneath their conception lies some form of reality that stems from how things are. In particular I was thinking about the idea of edges between things and boundaries.

A long time ago I put up a blog post about edges, which was where at the time my thinking was and as I've moved on somewhat since then, thought it time to revisit a pretty fundamental question, where are the edges of a drawing? A question that is inseparable from another one; where are the edges of anything?

This is not as simple a question as it might seem and in my presentation I explored the idea of a drawing's edges being about boundaries and I further argued that boundaries were themselves concepts that had emerged from the evolution of all animal species. So what did I mean?

Diagram of an amoeba

In my drawing of an amoeba above I have used a dashed line to define its edges, rather than a continuous one. This is to suggest that an amoeba's boundaries are permeable. If not the amoeba would not be able to catch food and eat it, it would also not be able to remove waste. On the other hand if it had no boundaries it would simply dissolve out into the water it lives within. We are as a biological entity, very similar to the amoeba and we also need to bring certain things into our bodies, such as air and nutrients as well as have ways to remove waste materials. Our bodies are constantly being interpenetrated by sweat, urine, liquids, food, faeces, snot, air, wax and mucus, there being a constant going into and coming out of the world into which we are embedded. 

I thought this diagram of the body was interesting, as it transforms it into a flat rectangle. It is now in essence no different to a sheet of paper. All drawings of the body flatten it out, but they often include visual clues that remind us that the body is in reality a three dimensional object. Greenberg reminded us that when engaged in making art on a flat surface, any form of illusion designed to make us think that what we are looking at is 'real', is in effect a lie. I suspect therefore that he would have far preferred the drawing of the body above to the one below.

Max Brodel: The throat

I have written about Max Brodel's work in an earlier post and I commented upon his attempts to give heightened realism to his images by developing unique methods of textural manipulation, so that his surfaces resembled the 'wetness' of our insides. These images in effect 'suck us into' the paper on which they are made. We are pulled through the paper's boundary by an act of illusion. 

However information still needs to flow in and out of a drawing and as its edges are where it meets the rest of the world, we can in our minds, begin to see a close analogy with the amoeba drawing above, as well as with the flattened out image of the body's various systems whereby it interacts with the exterior world. 

Every drawing sits within the world

As it is looked at a drawing is constantly in some sort of exchange with the perceiver and the surrounding world. There will also, as in any communication, be a lot of wastage, whether we like it or not. What interests me in this instance, is the fact that what is percolating in and out of the drawing is often unknown, but you sense it is something. The drawing is in effect changing the world, just as the drawing's situation in the world changes it. 

The space between the edge of a drawing and the world

Deridda has written extensively about the space between the edge of a drawing and the surrounding 'real' world and he uses the term ‘the parergon’ to describe it. He understands this space as one that is always coming “against or beside, the work that has been done", he states that "it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside, but neither simply outside nor simply inside”. He uses, after looking at drapery and colonnades, an example of the frame to explain what he means. (Derrida, p. 24, 1979) The space indicated by a frame being the boundary between the way we think about art and the way we act within the world. In my 'frame' drawing above, the space/frame includes traces of the marks I used to indicate various passages between a drawing and its environment, the space/frame being activated by the exchanges. 

Edges are strange things. As I look around me I see a table top, it has edges, the sort that are defined by an abrupt change in direction. My eyes sweep horizontality across the desk surface,  and then as I come to its edges, each one stops with a dramatic vertical drop. This experience is a common one associated with furniture. On the table top is a laptop computer. It too is seen to lie in a horizontal plane and has a vertical drop at the edges of its now closed screen, but the  drop is no more than a centimetre, therefore I see the laptop as belonging in some way to the table, it sits within a shallow space that appears to unify several other items that are also lying on the table. A book, some sheets of paper, an old I-pod. They are all rectangular and have edges. Their horizontality is defined by the table top, if the table top had been raised on one side to form a steep angle, all of these objects would also have had to follow suit, until they began to slide down the table top and fell onto the floor. They are also all perceptually permeable. Each one acting in a slightly different manner as it interacts with the wider world. 

For instance the book is something that as an object can be opened and closed. It is clearly entitled 'Picasso's Animals'. As I open it I'm faced with a text about Picasso's relationship with goats. For his 75th birthday he wanted a goat and although one did not arrive on his actual birthday, two did eventually materialise. Why do I remember this, perhaps because it is my 75th birthday this week and I have had great difficulty thinking about what people could get me. A goat was not on my birthday list and if I had put one on it I doubt if anyone would have responded. Once closed the book presents me with an image of a Picasso drawing of an owl, its eyes made from a photographic collage of cut out human eyes,  eyes that I suspect came from a cut up photograph of himself. The book is an object with very clear boundaries or edges, but it is leaking into my mind, because my perceptual apparatus embraces it within a visual and tactile framework, that is wired into all my brain's existing preconceptions. 

The lap top computer is now open, it has to be open so that I can type the words I'm typing. I had to break or cross a boundary to get in. I needed to put in a password on opening the computer by raising its lid, which itself contains its screen. It's edges or boundaries appear to be very different to the book. It is linked to invisible things such as the Internet and an electricity supply. I can push a memory stick into one of its ports and pull information out of it and interact with it myself directly by pushing down on the various keys in front of me. Like the book I can read text as it appears on the screen, as I do from an open page, but I can also create text, as I do now. I am sucked into the interface by a variety of engaging interactive components and it feels even more porous than the book. It not only seems to leak into my mind, it seems to be feeling out other minds too, this blog page, will as soon as it is published be available to all sorts of people, many of whom I have never met. 

There is a drawing on the desk, it is drawn on an open right side notebook page and sits next to couple of written notes that were made on the left hand page. The writing states:

He will live on in memories.

Order sealing wax. 

To send off a skimming stone for Oscar. 

Ken tells me Oscar is dead.
He does not publicly mourn his son.

The writing reminds me of something I need to do. A private ritual that will mean nothing to anyone else but myself. The words on that page, leaving the table and yet not leaving the table. They can be read by others but without an understanding of the full context. It's getting dark and I'm going to stop typing for a while, I shall return tomorrow morning and when I do, as I walk into the room I will again see these items lying on a table top, initially inert, reserved within their respective boundaries, their edges though begin fraying, as soon as I enter the room.

The edges of these things are their surfaces, but most surfaces when you get very close to them become full of holes. In particular paper is extremely perforated. 

Microscopic view of a 'flat' paper surface

In order to contain an image, we often put a frame around it. The frame reinforces our awareness of the edge in two directions. A frame puts glass or transparent perspex material over the top surface of a drawing and a wooden surround around its four edges. The surface acts as a type of boundary membrane, but so do the edges, which can also be seen as a type of boundary. In fact if we hold up the drawing within a frame such as those devised by Lina Bo Bardi, we can see clearly that the back of a drawing is also permeable to our gaze. 

Lina Bo Bardi: Glass easels

As I have already pointed out, Derrida used the word 'parergon' to define a sort of "supplement" to the main thing. Think in this case of a drawing being the main thing and its frame a secondary object. However Derrida being Derrida, decides that this relationship between the core and the periphery can be reversed. The supplement, the outside or secondary object, can be seen to be the centrepiece. Without a frame, the thing framed "cannot distinguish itself from itself". In my mind Derrida's frame is a sort of psychic space around an object that allows it to be itself and yet also interact with the rest of the world. This is the amoeba solution. Its boundaries need to be permeable. If not the object or drawing or thing, would not be able to nourish or maintain itself and if it had no boundaries it would simply dissolve into the surrounding environment. This is I realise another animist interpretation, but as a materialist, everything has I believe at some point to be able to merge and interconnect with everything else. 
Derrida as a writer often thinks of things as bookish realities, at one point describing the parergon as a book's liminal text. A liminal space is one such as a doorstep, a place between things, a space you need to pass through in order to get from one space to another. It can be thought of as a mediator, something that helps us to become engaged with the main event. In Derrida's mind perhaps a title, a foreword, a preface or even an index or commentary. In this case the help may become a far more potent item than the original text, by being more succinct and therefore more understandable, the supplement now becoming the driver. Lina Bo Bardi's glass easels are sometimes more visually powerful than the drawings or paintings they are meant to display, by framing the artworks in a new way, we are encouraged to approach them differently, we may for instance spend as much time exploring the back of an image as its front.

 

Thinking about the edge of things, eventually opens out an issue about 'thingness'. The idea of a thing is that it is separate from other things. But as I have pointed out, all things are in constant interconnection. Communication between things suggests that the edges of things are always frayed and that things bleed into one another. If we get close enough to things we can see how porous they really are, all living things requiring points for the surrounding world's entry and exit and all inorganic matter needing to engage in the quantum flux of spacetime, which enfolds everything in its various energy fields. The edge is therefore a boundary that is in reality simply an idea, a concept that allows us to decide where one thing begins and ends, rather than it being any sort of fixed reality. 

We should never forget that when animals set out to define their territory, that boundary within which they live most of their lives, many of them do so by using their body's waste products, either defecating or urinating to mark out the perimeters. The micro project of an amoeba, becoming an evolutionary reinvention on a macro scale. Once a territory is defined an animal can begin to think about doing other things, as they are no longer having to constantly think about how to defend borders, their olfactory signs doing that for them. Perhaps these signs can be thought of as first drawings, being both markers and definitions of physical space, that are also intimations of a creature's need for a mental space within which to do something more than just survive. 

Rhino marking territory

Reference:

Derrida, J. & Owens, C. (1979)The Parergon October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 3-41 (39 pages) https://doi.org/10.2307/778319

A recording of the Drawing Research online symposium, where you can listen to the talks given, including my own.

See also:

Edges

More on Lina Bo Bardi

Trapping and Framing

Stitched dashed or dotted lines

Paper, mobile phones and fingertips

The frame and the screen

I have posted before on the frame and the screen but have yet to bring together the various ideas associated with them both.
Framing is both a physical and an intellectual idea. The physical act of putting a frame around something operates as if it cuts whatever is framed away from the rest of the world. But it is not quite as simple as that.
Each type of physical framing changes the way we think about what is framed. 

How to window mount

The window mount

The window mount is probably the most common form of presentation and you will see images framed in this way in most art shops. It has various concepts behind it. One is the window of course, a window we look through in order to view the world like a picture, 'the picturesque'. It relates to the 'view finder' in a camera, a frame of selection, whereby the artist presents the best view, or a special selected image for contemplation. But there are other issues at work. Framing is often about degrees of separation, the cutting away or separating of the artwork out from everything else. If we look at the image of the landscape above it is framed by a wooden edge, as well as by a window mount. The physical edge of the wooden frame, creates a certain 'objectness' for the image, it brings it into the realm of 'other furniture', so that although the artwork is not necessarily 'furniture' it can be pulled into an association that allows it to be included within a 'domestic' frame of reference. For instance I'm sure you will have been in a hotel room with a framed abstract image installed within it that is obviously chosen to chime with the curtain design rather than to make you think deeply about existence. This doesn't always work of course, I often find myself thinking a lot about my existence after looking at the framed images on my hotel walls but I doubt these images are designed with me in mind. 

Image of an Edward Hopper painting taken from a framing service website

This is why when you go to a framing service website they will often have images showing you how the artwork will look framed alongside other items of furniture. However, sometimes within the frame, we have a second frame, or a third or even a fourth. 

This frame within a frame, is a device to make it appear as if you are entering into the image. It is meant to make you feel like you are walking down a corridor towards a window that is directly in front of you. You are in effect walking into the image and in doing so you are stepping from one world into another, rather like stepping into the mirror in Alice through the looking glass. This is a very powerful effect, but one that takes you away from reality, so only use this framing method if that is the effect you want.  

A frame within a frame

The card cutout we often call a window mount is called in the framing business a passe-partout, and is put between the picture and actual frame, which is the physical surround that holds everything together.

A collection of passe-partout window mounts

'French matting' uses gold lines to separate the image even further, to enhance the 'aura' of the image. The frame in many ways 'celebrates' the image as a possession. In cutting it out from the world, it can also be a way of making it easier to possess. If you look back at the framed image of a bird in a landscape above, you will also notice that the framing cuts into the edges of the image, (in this case the printing process has cut the edges away to leave a white border, but it is often the window mount that hides the edges of images) a small amount of the image will therefore never be seen and this is another issue artists have to think about when deciding whether or not to have work framed and window mounted. Compare the French matted landscape above with the image below by the Connor Brothers. 

Image 'floated' within a window mount.

The Connor Brothers' presentation fits two ideas together. On the one hand they are trying to reassert the 'objectness' of the image by showing us the edges of the paper by 'floating' the image within a window mount, which itself operates to separate the image out from the world and enhance its 'aura'. The wooden frame, operates to establish both an overall physicality or 'furniture', as well as establishing a degree of separateness from the world, which is furthered by the large expanse of white card between the image and the surrounding wooden frame. We are again looking at frames within frames and the corridor effect is still in play. 

Art Museum framing of a Vermeer

It's interesting to look at how as an object's worth increases, both as financial and cultural capital, its framing becomes more elaborate. In this case it is a complex double framing because the older frame that sits around the painting, is itself now an object of cultural capital, the black surrounding frame having the simplicity of a more 'Modernist' aesthetic. We still in effect walk down that invisible corridor into the image, but it is a corridor decorated in both modern and classical styles. 

Allan McCollum: Forty Plaster Surrogates

Back in the late 1970s Allan McCollum began making his plaster surrogates. What was interesting to me was the fact that they made you very aware of the framing process of art and of how this process was making new objects that were themselves part of the art idea. Take away the artist's work from inside the frame and you still have a powerful signifier, which is the frame itself. In McCollum's case his casts also make you very aware of the objectness of the frame. The paradox being that what began as surrogates were now very definitely art objects in their own right. 

Artists, myself included, sometimes want to reinforce the 'objectness' of their drawing or painting by floating the work within a larger box frame, in order to avoid the entrapment or suggestion of a window on the world which comes with a window mount. But in floating an image within a frame, there is an in-built contradiction. Looking back at Allan McCollum's Plaster Surrogates, you can see that the frame never goes away, it still operates as a separator between to put it very crudely, 'art and life'. 

So you may say, "Why not simply hang the painting or drawing directly on the wall?" The issue here is though that walls in the art world are also frames. 

If you look at the 'salon hang' from the late 19th century above, the first thing you become aware of is that there is no wall space. The heavy frames do all the work separating each image one from each other. The owner has bought the lot, and is showing off his or her purchase power. 

In the spotlit image above it is the lighting that frames the work, in fact it is the lighting that reinforces the idea of the 'aura'  of the work of art. The gallery has literally given each art-piece its own individual auratic glow. Turn the lights on and we are left with a white cube space.

The white cube, as written about by O’Doherty is not as a gallery space a neutral container. It is a historical construct that operates to 'frame' the artwork within it in a particular way.  It is an aesthetic object itself, with a particular aesthetic history, which we can trace back to sanitarium design and the need for hygiene. O’Doherty would go on to argue that this aesthetic actually overpowers the work that resides within it. Those white walls are not context free, the apparent neutrality of the gallery walls is just that, apparent, and the gallery's attempts to attain an aura of timelessness by either spotlighting the art or giving it lots of surrounding white space is a sort of salesperson's trick or slight of hand. 

O’Doherty looks at the gallery as a sacred space that is like an archeological tomb, undisturbed by time and containing cultural riches. The gallery is thus constructed to give the artworks lasting value; it is a space designed to immortalise the cultural values of our elite i. e. very rich people. Reminding us that galleries are also shops and like most shops they are designed to get you forget the worries of the outside world, the white cube establishing a crucial distance between that which is to be kept outside (the social and the political) and that which is inside (the everlasting value of art). In this case the artwork is framed to ensure that it is separate from the rest of the world, so that the buyer can clearly purchase its aura. In the case of this sort of art the buyer is also buying into the elite world of art and in doing so, establishing a certain set of credentials. 

Of course once you understand the game you can enter into it. You can play with the conventions and subvert them to your own ends. Framing and presenting can be a political decision as well as an aesthetic one. But it is important to remember that as the number of paintings are removed from the old collection that we see in the 19th century stereoscopic image above, more and more wall space is revealed, and this wall space operates as a frame. It might not be the golden, florid, decorative thing of the late 19th century, but it is just as much a frame, but this time it is masquerading as a neutral space. 

As you can see from this argument, the frame operates in the real world. It operates as a way of giving the observer a cut off or separate space within which to contemplate the artwork, but this operation is a complex one. The space of the frame oscillating between the 'real' world and an ideal space, a space within which art's spiritual or aesthetic values may be cultivated. As the world outside meets the world inside there is a complicated arena within which a certain duality comes into play. Deridda is fascinated by this and he calls it the parergon. 

It was Kant that linked the idea of the parergon to that of a painting's frame. On the one hand the frame is seen as an addition or ornament. It embellishes the artwork, but suggests Kant, it doesn't add anything to it. On the other hand Kant sees the frame as an example of something that is neither one thing or another, it is something detached or separate; detached not only from the thing it enframes but also from its surroundings, (the wall where a painting is hung). According to Kant, the parergon is like the gold leafed frame for a painting, a mere attachment added to gain superficial charm or grace, and which could in reality detract from the genuine beauty of the art. The frame belongs neither to the artwork nor does it operate as an article of useful furniture, you can't sit on it, eat from it or keep yourself warm, but in sitting between the two it operates as a permeable boundary, a space between the domain of the artwork and the environment of the room the work is hanging in. 

These 'liminal' or 'threshold' moments are essential to an understanding of animism and other forms of web-of-life spirituality that encompass both human and non human understandings of the world and I personally have thought of them as being similar to what Lewis-Davis in his book 'The Mind in the Cave' calls the membrane, or how neolithic peoples perhaps regarded cave walls that were used to support paintings. On the one hand they were just that, walls of caves that you could paint or draw on, but they also served as permeable barriers that allowed people to imagine a space beyond the depictions, one that included the world of spirits and a space in which negotiations between different animals and environments could be performed, often with a spirit guide or shaman. 

My understanding of Derrida in relation to this comes via Hegel. Hegel wrote extensively about the master/slave dialectic. The idea being that in a relationship where there is an imbalance of power what can happen is that gradually the one begins to depend on the other and as this dependency deepens the power begins to move from one to the other. I'm not sure how much this happens in reality, but it is a very interesting idea. 

Derrida is interested in dualities, he is always looking for openings that allow him to point out that what you think is happening is one thing but in reality it is something else. So in the case of the frame he suggests that what was thought of as an addition is in fact more important than the actual artwork. In doing this he spends a lot of time discussing the position of the frame as both in and out of the world and this is where I would like to bring the screen into the discussion. Like the frame, the screen also sits between one thing and another. It frames the images that appear within it and operates as a physical object in the 'real' world, you can hold it and touch it and treat it like a piece of furniture, but you can also forget it exists and fall into the world it contains. 

The selective frame and the circular lens

The formal issue that has always intrigued me is the relationship between the circle and the rectangle that happens between the lens and the sensor. The cartoon above epitomises the problem, the lens has a circular focus that cuts away the rest of the world, thus whatever that part of the world is linked to and shaped by is cut away, but then this cutaway is further re-framed within a rectangle. This action often totally changing the meaning of the event. Framing part of a wider complex event can even reverse its meaning; in the drawing's case, the left hand now threatening the right hand half of the image.

The Edinburgh camera obscura


If you go to see a working camera obscura, such as the one in Edinburgh, the first thing you become aware of is the nature of the curved image. This is what it is like inside the camera, but imagine a frame that is then placed over this circular image, and this is where the film or other photosensitive area is positioned.


The reframing is for a technical reason, the quality of the circular image worsens as we move farther from the lens' point of convergence. As we move towards the edge of the circle, images are dimmer, blurred and smudged. This is due to the lens, not the sensor. The lens converges light towards its centre, which means as you approach its edges you get less and more diffused light, hence the image edge's fuzzy-ness. This can be compensated for by the camera's sensor. A camera sensor compensates for a circular lens that distorts towards its edges in various ways, and because of a range of distortions, including aspherical elements, chromatic aberration, coma, low dispersion, and a high refractive index, has a lot of work to do. Sometimes it is worth looking at technical issues just to highlight how much the nature of a specific medium is shaping communication, so in this case because we are looking at how framing in photography effects meaning and the fact that framing is also a way of minimising but not eliminating lens distortion, I'm going to try and non-scientifically pass on some information.
At the centre of the problem with a lens in relation to focus is field curvature. Curvature of field, is a natural aberration of all lenses, due to their curved structure and how light moves through them and onto a flat plane. The edges of an image can therefore appear soft or distorted compared to the sharper central area. One of the most difficult things to resolve is chromatic aberration, which is when a lens can't focus the different colour wavelengths all at the same point. Wavelengths of light enter a lens and disperse as they pass through it, in order to get all the different wavelengths to come back together at the point of the sensor, these wavelengths need reorganising in order to become focused. Some very high quality lenses can do that, but there is always some difference in diffraction, the problem is technically called colour fringing. A drawing will as always clarify the issue, so let's look at a few technical drawings of the issues involved.

Colour fringing due to the different diffraction rates of light wavelengths

Lateral Chromatic Aberration is what occurs when different wavelengths of light are focused on the same plane, but at different positions, this being due to the angle of light entering the lens and is visible at the edges of the frame, rather than near the centre, which is why post-production or in-camera solutions are needed to alleviate this.
Spherical Aberration is caused by light rays entering the lens and not converging at the same point. This impacts on image clarity, sharpness, and resolution and is more likely to be seen further away from the centre of the image.

Light entering at different parts of the lens is not refracted accurately

Coma or comatic aberration occurs when light rays pass through a lens at an angle, as opposed to straight on. When a lens design cannot focus these angular light rays at the same point, the point light source will be depicted as a teardrop highlight, rather than a circular highlight. This can be minimised by stopping down your lens.

Light coming at the lens from an angle

Photographers are used to compensating for these things, in particular stopping down helps enormously. Stopping down means using a higher f-stop number which decreases the size or diameter of the lens aperture. Reducing the aperture size increases the depth of field, i.e. the focus is sharper over a greater distance. This is why pin-hole cameras really do need a tiny 'pin hole' for light to pass through.

We still haven't quite squared the circle, which is why we still rectangularly frame photographs, when the lens is circular and the resultant image is circular too. The corners of a rectangle are further away from the centre than the middle of edges to the left, right, top or bottom, therefore if there is going to be distortion it will be still be revealed in those corners. In fact early cameras often had circular plates such as Thompson’s Revolver Camera from 1862 and 'button' cameras, designed to make small images button sized and shape that could be actually worn like a button. So it wasn't as if the circular format hadn't been considered. The frame as a rectangle, is a powerful concept and somehow it feels right to slice out recorded segments from life with a hard straight edge rather than a circular one. The telescope and the microscope both retain the circular form that reflects the shape of a lens, but as soon as we wanted to record directly what was seen through these optical devices, it was the picture within a rectangular frame that was the right format.

Thompson’s Revolver Camera 

As soon as an image is made it has to fit a 'rectangular' world. Walls are rectangles and so are tables and shelves. Its easier to make right angled frames and film on a roll or as a plate is easier to use with rectangular formats. So there are a lot of simple practical reasons for retaining a rectangle for the photograph, but they are all linked to our overall shaping of the world with geometry. Cave paintings were not in rectangles, it is only when geometry begins to impose itself on construction methods that the circular or more organic form becomes relegated to history.

Buildings have been built using geometric principles for thousands of years, but the idea of the frame in relation to a moveable image is quite recent. It is believed that Egyptian Fayum mummy portraits from around 2,000 years ago were made before the person died. They were then hung on a wall until they died and then the portrait was fixed onto the coffin. Whether or not this is true, and there are arguments about how they were used, these images were portable and they would have been placed around the painter's workshop and probably taken into various residences in order for the artists to catch a likeness of the person. There are traces of a surrounding frame on many of them, there frames may have been to fix them to the coffin or to display them on a wall or for both reasons, whichever reason is right, these were portable images that were at one point framed.

Fayum mummy portrait

Before the portable frame, there was the border and the border operated as a frame. I have been to see the mosaic of the stag hunt at Pella near Athens and you can look down on the floor from a balcony above, as well as walk up to the edges of it on the ground floor. The surrounds operate as a powerful set of symbolic forms, setting the scene of human /animal inter-action within an environment that signifies the wider 'cosmic' arena of nature. The frame in this case is a floor and the image an incident or moment to be picked out within a surrounding world of land and sea life. 

Stag hunt: Pella

We can see the link between architecture and the frame in Classical Greek ceramics. Columns are often used to divide spaces up, the artists obviously linking the idea of an important three dimensional architectural space, often signified by tall columns outlining the entrance, with two dimensional scenes operating around the continuous surface of a ceramic vessel. 

Although borders, or columns acting as frames in ancient art were used to divide scenes as well as provide space for ornamentation in both pottery and wallpaintings, the first wooden frames surrounding images as we know them today appeared on small panel paintings in twelfth and thirteenth century Europe. Often painted onto one solid piece of wood, the area to be painted was carved out, leaving a raised border around its edge. The outer edges were usually gessoed and gilded, before any painting was done, which was often the last part to be completed. Much of the meaning was embedded in the cost of the materials and records from this time emphasise the cost of various materials in craftsmen's contacts, the idea of worth being given to an image by artistic invention was something that would have to wait for the Renaissance.  

The use of mitred moulding strips for making the edges of panels came later, and gradually replaced the simple wooden moulding strips that were attached to the outside edges, especially as larger pieces of wood became harder to get hold of, because more and more of Europe's forests had been cut down for fuel as well as for ships, furniture and housing. 

Paolo di Giovanni Fei: 14th Century painting on wooden panel using an engaged frame

The image above has a frame built around it, (an engaged frame) the frame is deeply carved out, the golden space that the figures exist in being a religious space rather than an actual space, the frame being in effect a spiritual building or architecture to place the iconic image of Mary and Jesus within. The frame is used to give the effect that you are stepping from one world into another, an idea that artists in western Europe will return to many times. 

As you can see a frame is a complex idea and one I shall probably return to again and again. It links newer forms of image presentation with older ones and has always been related to cutting something out of reality and making it special. 

The TV when looked at historically has had a wide range of framing concepts engaged with it, and the particular time periods within which these surrounds were developed also have stylistic impacts on the situation. Because the TV was always associated with the idea of 'modern communications' it was also often placed in a containing surround that was designed to state that modernity.

The state of the art TV screen immediately above has a very thin black border and we are often sold an idea that suggests this border is so thin, it creates no separation between you and the reality the TV depicts. The ultra real 'high definition' screen, allowing you into a world that is as real as the one you are in. Although this frame is wafer thin, in some ways the belief in a new 'realistic' technology is not that dissimilar to the belief in a religion. 

In both cases, the argument is that you can escape your messy, difficult reality by passing through the frame into another world. One is a world of sophisticated technology and imagined universes and the other is of sophisticated technology and imagined universes, we just think they are very different, but the panel painting was at the cutting edge of image technology during its time and the high-definition TV screen is too, but for how long?

See also:

Trapping and framing

More on framing

The frame and the banner

Drawing into installation

A more architectural presentation format

Framing a large drawing

Hanging large drawings

Fixings and fittings

Mathematical shapes of interest (Includes some comments on aspect ratio) 

Edges

The mobile phone screen

The salon hang

Edges

All papers have edges and edges mean things. This post will try and unpick some of the issues surrounding edges as well as introducing a few technical pointers to think about when working with flat surfaces that have boundaries.

The concept of the edge is a complex one involving, psychology, (concerning the degree of separateness or connection that we perceive between things, or simply a divide between one thing and another), aesthetics and visual metaphor. Edges are the boundaries within which you work and how you physically control and conceptualise these, shapes the way your practice is read.

Aesthetics is a domain of philosophy and the edge can be conceptualised as being part of the discourse surrounding the frame. You could think of a drawing on a sheet of paper as a world within a world. (The same is true of a painting or screen based image) It is separate from the world and yet part of it. The edge, boundary or frame then becomes the space between the ‘real’ world and the world of the image. Jaques Derrida has written extensively about this space and uses the term ‘the parergon’ which he describes as coming “against, beside, the work done,…it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside, but neither simply outside nor simply inside”. (Derrida, 1978) The edge or frame being the boundary between the way we think about art and the way we act within the world. One way to think about this is that the ‘real’ world is reflected upon within art by bringing it inside the frame, however the world inside the frame is of course still existing in the real world. What is different though is that we ‘read’ this inside world ‘aesthetically’, it being the space of Kant’s ‘disinterested interest’. The edge or frame signifies that we are to read this special object differently to other objects in the world. This allows the artist to deal with Metonymy, a concept that can be applied to something that is visibly present but which represents another object or subject to which it is related but absent. (The original use of metonymy was as a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is called not by its own name but rather by the name of something associated in meaning with that thing or concept. In the visual arts it is often used as a type of replacement, paper substitutes for skin etc.) Earlier posts on mimesis open out other ideas associated with this.

You can also simply see the edge of your paper as the edge of the world, to go any further you simply drop off the edge and fall into oblivion. Therefore the closer you get to the edge, the closer you are to a metaphorical death. The black edge of the mourning card being a symbol that uses this concept.

An undertaker's card with black edge.

Borders, edges and frames are of course physical essentials and can be controlled in several ways. Each approach will affect our understanding of the relationship between a sheet of paper and the world.

The sharp guillotined edge. 

Sharp cut edges suggest not only the machined nature of the process, but the drama of a sudden ending. The paper is literally cut off. This may be cut off from a roll or cut out of a sheet, in either case, it will have been cut out of a larger context. The cut edges suggest an isolation from its previous existance, its edges give no clue to its previous life, which has been cut clean away. The eye meets this type of edge suddenly and there is no information to be gained beyond the sharpness of the cut. This may of course be at times not fully completed, half-cut, the surface not quite cut through, this of course suggesting an uncompleted act of violence. Because there is no mediation between the paper and the coming of this type of edge into our field of vision, our looking simply stops at the edge, we drop off a sheer cliff face of looking and when drawing have to either completely avoid or ignore the paper’s dead ends.

A good book binder will be able to tell if a paper has been guillotined or cut with shears.

Compare the cut edge to a deckle edge. A deckle edge is created by the mould making process. When the wet paper is drawn from the vat, the frame allows excess water to drain away through the mesh. However as the water streams away it also pulls some of the paper fibres over the edge of the frame, these create the unique look of mould made paper, the edge being a clear reminder of the process of making, the paper’s history embedded within its appearance. When we look at the surface of mould made papers the first thing we are aware of is how they are made, the mesh structure that was attached to the frame is embedded into the texture of the paper surface and as we look across the paper surface, our eyes come to the edge and there is a change in appearance, the paper is slightly thinner and its fibres are revealed as part of the deckle structure. This edge tells us about the paper, it signifies its history and above all the paper is understood as a whole sheet, it was made to be the size and shape it is, not cut down from a larger entity. It looks hand made and suggests a richer interior life.

A deckle edge. 

So how might you work with these issues? Sometimes you have to cut papers to size. If you want to be in control of the dynamics of a rectangle sometimes sheets of paper have to be much thinner or closer to a square. If you are using paper with a natural deckle edge a cut side looks wrong. Therefore you can tear the paper in order to achieve a much softer edge, one that is much more in character with the deckles. You can tear off an edge using a ruler or metal straight edge. Fold the paper over and use a bone folder to firm it down (the college shop sells bone folders for creasing and folding papers, they are made of hard white plastic) then holdiing the paper down with the flat of your hand, work the straight edge through the fold and it will tear away an edge gently enough to appear like a deckle. 

A large metal ruler is an essential part of an artist's kit. 

For an edge slightly sharper but not too sharp, again use the bone folder but use it to burnish the fold slightly and then use a blunt knife rather than a straight edge to break the fold’s fibres. Other ways of roughening up the edges can be to clamp a pile of guillotined papers to the edge of a table and roughen the edges with a file. (You need two clamps and a bar of wood to do this properly) ‘Feathering’, drawing the blade of a very sharp knife or razor over the edge of a paper on the underside and then scraping away part of the surface at an angle is also sometimes done. You can of course be very inventive with this, wetting edges, rubbing them, beating them, applying colour (think of old books when they colour the edges of pages), there are lots of possibilities all of which change the appearance of the edge and direct the viewer’s attention to this very particular but often overlooked aspect of all sheets of paper. If you were a painter the edge of the canvas would be vital to you, it is exactly the same with a drawing.

At the core of this edge business is the difference between using the paper as a window into another world, as opposed to using it as an object. This is the key issue in relation to the frame and different types of mounting that can be done when presenting the work.

A frame or border can be placed around an image (this includes leaving a clean border around a print), the border can then act as a separator from the ‘real’ world or window into a world within a world. This is Derrida’s parergon issue. By doing this we single out the image as belonging to a separate reality. However it is of course impossible to separate anything from the real world, all things are by definition part of it. Therefore by suggesting that we can, this can be read as a type of lie. (See the posts on mimesis and Plato’s concerns about this) In order to overcome this issue we can instead present the artwork as an object. An object that has a reality of its own, but not a reality separate from the one we experience everyday. The paper should then be presented as paper, not window mounted, edges clearly seen and hung in such a way that the reality of the situation is clear.

In order to work with these issues my advice is to photograph how artists are hanging work.

A recent addition to hanging methods is the small strong magnet. This means you don't have to put holes in the paper. 

Before you can use magnets you need to put screws into the wall in the exact place you need them. The iron of the screw head provides the magnet with something to bond with, so don't use brass screws.

Some artists use elaborate clips and wire frameworks to hang heavy pieces. Again this requires a lot of preparation beforehand. 

Sometimes the hanging method takes over, in this case bulldog clips are being used to join papers and create an elaborate structure that moves the thinking process into wider sculptural concerns. These edges between disciplines are often fascinating. 

There are of course lots of variations between the two extremes of framing and hanging, my own work always causes me problems as to where I want the read to start and I often use a half-way house, floating the paper off a backboard (to emphasise its reality) and yet putting the whole lot behind a frame, suggesting its separate nature as a narrative.

The point as always is that there is plenty to think about and that you as artists need to be in control of what you are doing, and control usually leads to invention because you have to make more refined decisions.

See also:

Drawings as exhibition proposals
Trapping and framing
Framing a large drawing
The frame and the banner
Fixings and fittings
Hanging large drawings
More on framing
From drawing to installation

Paper: A material conversation