‘Drawings, outdoors, line’ (2018)

One particular vein of working during my time on the MA Fine Art Course (University of Chester), has been to make textures of line on paper and other supports in response to different impulses: the aim was to capture the feeling of an indoor or outdoor environment - how the spatial qualities of the place or landscape manifested in feelings of expanse, constriction, and boundedness. I also responded to sounds that I heard.

The drawings that emerged in the process of this landed on paper, on wooden sticks, and on large scrolls of lining paper. The combination of these linear textures together with the supports on which I made them produced objects with their own unique ‘object-hood’, whatever this new object’s quality or identity might be….

Aside from the object status of these artefacts, I was also interested in the way in which the linear textures could be understood as abstract maps or landscapes, visualisations of the relationship between a person’s (my own) feelings in space and the environment. When making some of the drawings I consciously played with the idea that the emergent drawing reminded me of scientific charts that might use maths to visualize a process. In some of the drawings I used letters and numbers to create a sense of ‘before and after’ suggesting a process that is numbered or labelled, thus also hinting at the linearity and temporality of the drawing process, and, of any process….

I also explored making a drawing by gradually adding one sheet of paper after the other to a slowly expanding surface of paper on the floor (and putting linear textures onto it). This emergent floor drawing correlated with a similarly shaped drawing hung on an adjacent wall.  

All this work aimed to explore connections between visual observations in an environment, my experiences of my embodied disposition in these spaces, and particular three-dimensional qualities of the indoor or outdoor spaces.

In a further way to explore the connection between line and space I used elastic string as a sculptural addition in outdoor environments: I discovered that wind would pick up the length of line that I had suspended between two raised points, move it and this movement produce humming sounds of alternating frequencies. Depending on the changing nature of the wind, the sounds might be slow, deep hums or sharp nervous hisses….I attached the ends of these long elastic lines on fence posts, or rocks, or, I might hold an end in my hand, and even walk around whilst holding the string. If we understand a landscape as an environment that naturally has its very own performances of change as they occur due to weather, seasons, and actions of human and non-human actors, then these linear additions, my movements and the sounds of the strings added a new theatrical dimension to the land.