Drawing Underground

A quick post to explain my interest in drawing in new locations.  While researching Artists’ sketchbooks for an AHRC funded project I ventured into the Tate Archive to look at Turner sketchbooks.  After an hour or so silently turning the pages and onto my second Turner notebook I found, in the Yorkshire 4 sketchbook, a drawing that snapped me out of my reverie Inside Yordas Cave, 1816. What a peculiar drawing!  It’s wild and jagged, lacking Turner’s customary measured precision.  Another, a few pages on, is more extreme, like a section from a seismograph.  Of course they were drawn in restricted light.  At the time Yordas Cave in Kingsdale, North Yorkshire was a show cave on the Victorian tourist trail, complete with local guides carrying candles and torches. 

Having now drawn in Yordas I know that even modern head torches provide only sufficient light to gather broad impressions but not enough to uphold the supremacy of vision.  Other senses are levelled up and bear greater influence on perceptions and responses; I felt this effect powerfully, and I think in part, this explains the look of Turner’s cave drawings.  Is he drawing the whole experience? Perhaps inadvertently, is he drawing what it feels like to be there?

My interest in the Turner drawings is balanced between gaining purchase on how we might understand the Yordas drawings, and pursuing a way of working that I find difficult but fruitful.  On the one hand I’m curious about the cave drawings as ‘embodied drawing’ as evidence of Turner ‘being or becoming’ in that place at that moment, and possible relations to Ruskin’s dictum in the preface to his The Elements of Drawing (1857) where he asserts drawing as an instrument for gaining knowledge rather than an end in itself:

  I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw. (Ruskin, 1970, p.13)

This, and developing a ‘first hand’ exploratory practice that can sit alongside a growing corpus drawing languages, many relying on the free circulation of mediatised images, that can contribute to a plural landscape of drawing ideas, debates, approaches and outcomes.  Moreover, one that engages peers and audiences in visual and conceptual experiences that are engaging, meaningful, even exciting.

These images are from my most recent trip underground to County Pot in the Easegill system with cave guide Chris Chilcott and art historian Ian Heywood. 

Gerry drawing in County Pot, Easegill West System.  May 2013



County Pot.  Folded stream cut cave walls and pillar.

Over the last few years curiosity about drawings relationship with sight, haptics and kinaesthetics has led to a variety of graphic approaches with different forms, materials and scales, and to drawing in a range of controlled and imposed conditions - from total darkness and mostly submerged to conventional and comfortable.

 



County Pot.  Large passage entered through opening in the roof.

The drawings attempt to depict what’s actually there, but are equally informed by the shapes I have to make with my body and the disorientation created by uncertainly about which way up or down one is.  Alongside capturing the complexity and texture of rock formations other impressions crowd in and present their own unique challenges.  How to depict the non visual whilst also retaining a sense of site; how to draw the taste of fellwater, coldness, sounds of cascades and drips, smells of earth and ionised air; how to represent the feeling of ‘being there’ within a drawing of a location and its particular geology?



County Pot.  Large chamber called 'Ignorance is Bliss'.




Old Ing Pot.  Passage and pools leading to flooded sump.

A Situated and Sensitive Drawing

A key question is emerging in our discussions about this project: what do we call this type of drawing which is the focus of Walking the Line? Site-specific? Site –sensitive? Situated? Cross-disciplinary? Locational? None seem fully comprehensive. On the one hand we want to encompass a sense of being in a specific place, either geographically or conceptually, and on the other acknowledge the responsiveness of the drawing in the encounter.  

A 20^th century example of this type of situated and site sensitive drawing is found in Barbara Hepworth’s hospital drawings, made in operating theatres between 1947-49.These drawings depict not simply observed fact but communicate what is felt; they convey the experience of being in surgery.

Barbara Hepworth,  Concentration of Hands II (1948)

 

  In these drawings we see Hepworth noticing particular qualities of the operating theatre – the brightness and direction of light, the concentration in the eyes of the surgeons - and looking for graphic equivalents. We see parallels between the surgical procedures depicted and the artist’s process:  Hepworth uses a bone dry gesso surface, scrapers and sharp points to incise, the edge of a razorblade to scrape back.  These are newly developed tactile and haptic techniques specifically designed to marry with the particular actions and intentions of the surgeons.

Hepworth makes clear the situated nature of the drawing experience: “body experience… is the centre of creation. I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body”.[1]

Barbara Hepworth,  The Scapel II (1949)

We might see this evident in the quiet composure, the sense of tension, the intent focus of the figures depicted, gathered around the operation, illuminated by the an intense light of the operating lamp. The figures are bathed in light from behind, lending them a mysterious glow, akin a divine light highlighting a sense of mysetry or miracle in the scenario. 

 

 

 The experience of drawing in the surgery brought about a change in Hepworth’s drawing, and manifests an increasing graphic specialisation. Hepworth herself noted “from all these experiences and from the paintings and drawings I made, I learned how better to observe the world around me“. [2]In other words through sustained engagement in this particular world of surgery, the drawing became adapted to the specificities of representing the surgical procedures.

Perhaps here we should note a crucial difference in what Hepworth was doing and to the artist simply ‘going’ out to unusual or far flung places.  By contrast consider the nineteenth century naturalist- artist who goes out to record exotic flora and fauna deploying the conventions of the day. The language of drawing is unchanged by the observation, remaining demonstrably that of botanical illustration.  This example of the naturalist might be conceived of as a ‘colonial’ approach- using drawing to record, and gather, without the drawing ‘going native’, i.e. the languages of drawing being altered by the experience.

The difference in short is that engagement with drawing in the example of Hepworth’s Hospital drawings results in innovation within drawing. A specific and specialist technique is refined, developing and expanding existing graphic conventions and an understanding of what drawing can do.

So, folloing this post, we intend to post about our own practices shape our approach to this kind of drawing... 

 

---

[1] Cited in Judy Chicago, Through the Flower ( 1985), p.142

[2] Barabra Hepwoth  An Artist’s View of Surgery (1952) reproduced in Nathaniel Hepburn, Barbara Hepworth Hospital Drawings ( 2012) p.83.

Walking the Line in the Context of Drawing Today

Drawing today is characterised by plurality. We see a broad range of practices encompassing diverse approaches, processes, imagery, aims and intentions. Indeed, one of the frequently lauded strengths of drawing is this plurality, its adaptability and ubiquity.

In recent years, innovations in contemporary drawing have come under fire for being mere ‘boundary busting’^[1]-  we can probably all call to mind examples of drawings whose raison d’etre is to challenge the definition of what drawing is. The artists in the project stand in contrast to this attitude of innovation for innovation’s sake; for while their drawing is innovative, these are innovations which arise from sustained engagement with the world.  Drawings which ask questions of the world and in negotiating answers develop innovations. 

Essentially our questions about the artists and work we are interested in are about how they produce knowledge.  Or perhaps more precisely, what kind of knowledge can this type of drawing produce?  Again, and a step further, this line of questioning takes us to what, ultimately can we do with this knowledge? Finally, are these ‘utility’ arguments for drawing meaning; is this a special species of ‘applied drawing’ that we are looking at?

Our position isn’t definitional; we are not seeking to establish what drawing is, or seeking to establish a new category with its values, participants and distinctive images.  It’s possible that Walking the Line will need to differentiate to describe distinctive or exclusive approaches, and it may have its ‘manifesto moments’.  If it does it will be one manifesto amongst many and, as Lawrence Alloway expressed in the 1960’s, pluralism is a continuum advancing along a broad front of culture.[2]  Consequently, it is from within an inclusive field of contemporary practices we have noticed a peculiar type of drawing – it is this which is the focus this research project. 

‘Drawing is a verb, not a noun’, Richard Serra’s well known assertion that drawing is a doing thing rather than a static name is a useful way of appreciating the complexity around making, researching and writing about drawing.  Together drawing practice and research must be doing things and both be on-going, plural, and relatively or simultaneously mobile on many fronts. 

One of things which interest us about this type of drawing is that its characteristics and ethos may be traced back to historical innovations and ideas about drawing- to those of Ruskin or Leonardo for example. However, our intention is not revisionist, to revive drawing from the past, or return to earlier approaches of drawing as a standard for today. Instead, these historical relationships become one of many lenses through which to see and understand possibilities for drawing today. In turn, our enriched understanding of contemporary drawing may come to reflect upon historical knowledge.

---

[1] Ken Currie, ‘In Defence of Drawing’ reprinted in Drawing Breath ed. By Anita Taylor and Paul Thomas (London: Wimbledon College of Art, 2007), unpaginated.

[2] Nigel Whiteley, Art and Pluralism Lawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), p.62.