Working with the Title :-
‘Learning a move – marking a breath: action and resistance through drawing’ – searching for knowledge and invention within the drawing site’
Walking away from the experience with a stronger understanding of how drawing and the ‘work’ of art operate. The sense of having simply touched the dust of the subject lingers on. This is the beginning… which kept arriving over and over within the work. Coming back, looping back until that was the image that became solid, the return and emergence of knowledge, permanently in a new state of arrival with information embedded. Using loose paper and different tones of ink, structuring this around photos of drawing, delivered a suitably poetic response to the question.
I abandon the outline and work from one or various points on the paper – the drawing emerges and expands from each place, often merging and fusing with another area. I learn each touch of the pencil on the paper as an offering, an act of giving…. the paper returns with all multiple shades and tones of a knowing reply – a broken response of uneven breathing amongst a flow and ripple of moving.
B E G I N N I N G
It was as a spoken performance, the words seeped out from the pages.
soaked, spare pages from dissertation – reworked into form
Cutting the story short: – research took me to looking at Elaine Scarry’s work on beauty and social justice. Avis Newman’s work on drawing – gestures and traces – functioning from the unconscious. Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on Listening – how hearing is a choice, listening is an act…. listening to the body speak. Looking to the work of Ron Mueck, Avis Newman and Paula Rego – the dance work of Teresa de Keersmacker. Delight in finding Sylvia Plath‘s drawings and despair at not knowing about them before… so often within research there is the hideous realisation that I know nothing… But the work of the Prof – Johnny Golding proves otherwise… hope and faith in curiosity saves the day.
My fairies in their hobnailed boots constantly energised and ready to work
they sharpen the pencils, line them up and as the pencil touches the paper
they breathe out and start their dance……
This is an engagement with a creative process and the place in this that displaces, relocates and speaks back, the self through material.
Sarah Goudie 