Letters to the void – Tracing Rhythms

I have spent a large amount of time working with paper and drawn line over the last few months.

Working on and across paper, on films and transparencies, drawings and thinking about sections of drawings where the lines draw me to connect with them.

Amy Sillman describes drawing as an action verb. Here drawing is understood as the action of making with a tool and with your body: moving in different directions simultaneously. It is pulling something from something to something else in a multi-way relationship; substrate, surface and body.  There is a relationship between the eye, the body and the hand –the hand, the tool, the body and the drawing surface and finally the marks on the paper and between the eye of the artist and what lies beyond.

I wonder if there is something about my relationship between the physical nature of making, the materials and journey of travelling to find a space where my eyes can pause. Just as when I am walking, the journey to a place of pause is the key to the experience and connection to place.  The images which are revealing themselves through this process am drawn to lines that meander, connecting to other lines but also to the connection of the negative spaces.

For me drawing has enabled a way for me to think about my body in the world.

Drawing one mark at a time, temporal, fragile, instantaneous, all drawing is of the moment, you are looking, acting and reacting while you are thinking and feeling. The drawing becomes the residue of these relationships and conversations, making them visible.

The prints and paper cuts are building a series of works which reflect the relationship between inside and outside, boundaries between energies of the body, materials and the world around us. These boundaries cease to be clear and the hand made marks serve as a kind of border between invisible energies and the body as receptor.

‘Drawings very intimacy is that it records what lies beyond the body but from the sight of the body and in the form of touch of the body’

Jean-Luc Nancy