About Line
Uillinn/Cork County Council Artist in Residence
2 April - 4 May 2024
This four week residency in Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre was a rich period of enquiry into line, body and space. As an emerging artist it has been a foundational moment in my practice. It is the beginnings of what I intend to be a continual and ever deeper delving into expanded drawing.
I am very grateful to Uillinn and Cork County Council for this opportunity to stretch my mind and body and line. Starting on the floor and moving to the high bright walls of the studio it was a brilliant chance to understand scale. To understand line in relation to my own body and in relation to the body of the viewer.
I wrote a reflection upon the closing of the residency which you can read below and rather than retrospectively editing it I will leave it in its raw state. However here is one brief thought: temporality is very present in my current work and looking back this residency provided a moment of going deeper into the temporal nature of line and drawing. Returning, repeating, staying, being.
Ink and polychromos colouring pencil on paper, approx 350 × 150cm, installed with hanging wooded dowels which are painted and carved.
Three works on paper, ink and polychromos colouring pencil, approx 350 × 150cm, installed with hanging wooded dowels which are painted and carved.
A drawing is simply a line going for a walk - Paul Klee
Hanging dowels painted and carved.
Ink and polychromos colouring on paper, approx 350×150cm
Ink on paper is approx 350 × 150cm, installed with hanging wooded dowels which are painted and carved.
Reflection
04/05/2024
It is about line. It is about movement and encounter. About time and embodiment.
As we move through this landscape of our lives, and the local landscape of our everyday experience, we are a line. We draw an invisible line, the line of our trajectory through. Our line of moving. I am using drawing and line to think this through. To think about the points of intensity where we veer and change course. The moments of encounter we share with others. The accumulated weaving of our lines as we shift, and encounter, and affect each other and how we are affected by the space around us.
It is about action in space. From the small nearly unnoticeable action to the large. Changing and defining space, And I mean space in the broader sense of our lived environment, and here in the studio, I mean the white space of the paper.
It is about using line to extend the embedded knowledge of our perceptual experience. There is a feeling way of knowing how we exist within this space around us. Of how we exist within the movements of others. It is about listening to our body’s knowledge, listening with line.
Our line of movement is affected by accidental influences at every point. The soft affect, the slight wind, and the more extreme and larger moments.
It is about time, and different types of time, the quick embodied feeling line, the reencounter of points along the line with smaller meditative detail, and the softer repetitive time spent of slow careful colour. About going back to the line and reconsidering it, how its nature changed through its making what was unseen at the time of its making.
Each movement we make, be it soft and slow, each way of being, be is large and loud, weave together equally creating the surface of our lives.
Three works on paper, ink and polychromos colouring pencil, approx 350 × 150cm, installed with a hanging wooded dowel which is painted and carved.
Hanging wooden dowels, carved and painted.
Taking Up Space In Softness: An Embodied Drawing Workshop
During this residency I also facilitated two workshops exploring line, perception, embodiment, taking up space and collective drawing. This workshop was about slowing the space down with meditative embodied drawing and taking up space through movement and slow soft accumulative marks. We worked on the floor on large rolls of paper and used chalk pastel and coloured pencil. The workshop was guided throughout and began with a settling meditation, then an introduction of things to consider while drawing, and points of focus throughout.
After the introduction there were two main parts; a large individual embodied drawing, which was a chance to focus fully on your body with large and varying gestural mark making, and then a collective drawing of a softer slower meditative nature.
There was no outcome required except to make marks on the page and to focus inwardly on yourself and your embodied experience of space.
Things we thought about: Does your emotional state change depending on the landscape/place you are in? Does your perception of the landscape change depending on your internal world? What are the small moments of happening and encounters that influence your daily life? How do you take up space, do you feel free to? Is there a way of articulating the deep knowledge you hold in your body? How do these considerations appear through varying line and mark making?
This workshop was a chance to use line and movement to think through these things. A chance to slow down and use drawing as a way to think and spend time in your body. It was a chance for me to bring my practice to others and to think through line in relation to others.
This type of collective drawing will continue to appear and develop throughout my practice.