Large drawing, like a long run.
Working the physical surface of the paper roll felt like working on land, repetitively, straining my back and my hands, seeing a larger picture and pattern emerge from many small steps. Thoughts came to mind, about the detail of the particular 'area' where I was just drawing, but also there was this dimension of forgetting oneself in the process and being moved along by it.
Taking line to the hills, inscribing into a situation, and allowing the environment to change the installation. This was the idea behind these experiments and installations. The sounds were unexpected 'windfall' by the process.
I made the videos in the midst of winter in the area above Pott Shrigley in the Peak District of the UK. The wind was mostly ferocious and conditions in general were very hard to manage. Many times the wind blew over the tripod and the only way to record the videos, in the end, seemed to pin the camera to the ground with tent pegs. The process of making illustrated dramatically (for me dramatically that is) how we interact with the environment making exposure and vulnerability of our bodies a dominant theme.
How does an image taken on a journey, and changed through it, work with its changing surroundings?
Making this carry-round-with-me corsage felt like an endurance act: The repetitive pencil movements reminded me of raking grass or leaves, and slowly moving over a field. The compartments seemed to like fenced or walled in areas on land, defining ownership and use.
A parallel arena in which drawing acts like moving over land?
When water levels get to the record of a journey.....
Metaphor as the working tool here....?
How else to use 'picturing' devices in the outdoors ....to allow the environment create its visual impact based on my view, my positioning of these mirrors?
Taking the drawing for a run,....body and drawing becoming marked by each other.
Having brought back some words from a run, I felt, the drawing to represent the running journey needed to have its own three-dimensionality to 'house' the words where they belonged.
Is the paper surface with the drawing and the words like a second arena, like a parallel site or world where the experience is relived, but also transformed and 'moved on'?
How could I use the words, that come back with me after a running journey to craft some document that speaks of the past experience? Richard Long has used this kind of format,...so I tried it out myself. After I had made a little presentation to a group of people here in the village, about artist working with the environment, and showing them one of Richard Long's text arrangements....I feel very irrelevant with my humble attempts.....
Words have always been so important for all my work so far. I record quick 'notes' on my phone, rather than write them down. Trying to be brief and not water down their essence through saying too much. Are the words just aids for reflection? Do they become part of drawings or of what could be a performance? Are they already a picture? Or literature?
The presence of the things close by...and how we attach relevance to them....
How dependent is this of a person running through or not?
Is the material agency of the direct foreground only activated through the presence of the subject running through?
I have read some of Paula Kramer's PhD thesis " Dancing Materiality', ...but she dances in the vicinity to the material scene that she has created...I am moving away from it, leaving it to the camera and it's not so clear role in it all, to 'define' things.
The pencil drawing is actually composed of two drawings: the one behind and below is the un-adulterated, non-creased version of a second drawing of the same kind, sitting on top of the first one. The second one went round with me, on a run, strapped to my skin with cling film. The first one stayed at home, to tell the difference. The drawing marked the skin and the movement marked and creased the drawing.
I took this chalk dust covered corsage out with me on a run. I strapped it against my skin, wearing it underneath the t-shirt. In order to keep it in shape, I 'cling-filmed' to my torso, to make it stay in place. It did stay in place, and the heat, friction and body movement made it mark my skin's surface. The colour of the brown changed in places too....
This reminds me strangely of Archeology: Taking decay and the natural processes of desintegration as a mark making process.
There is also this dimension about who marks what? Does the skin and body mark the drawing, or, does the drawing mark the body,....who is the agent here...or, how do the agents collaborate?
Preparing a paper corsage to take out on a run, ....the drawing movements press down the paper's surface and brown pencil dust gets through the holes created by the sewing machine's needle. The marks on the surface remind me of fields....like the running going through areas of land.
Whilst staying at Dartington Hall, Devon for a Symposium organised by Art.dot.Earth, I went out early in the morning to draw, using my own brought wax-impregnated surfaces and the 'supports' (ground, bench,...fence) provided by the location.
At the time of making this video, I found it was 'pretty extreme' to take drawings, get myself and the drawings through this little stream and let us all get a bit changed from the water....Well, maybe the relevance of such an experiment sits in its performative potential and should not be seen as mainly focussing on the video end product or the end product of the drawing.
In anticipation of a running journey, I mad this drawing. Expecting to move through certain areas I tried to find simple ways of marking out the terrain of the run, allowing a distortion of the actual distances to make it 'true' to the feel of it and the course of the journey expected. The plan was to take the drawing with me and draw on it, whilst being out!
