Drawology

Drawology, 20 November – 6 December 2013, Bonington building, Nottingham Trent University

Included in the Drawology exhibition in Nottingham were three short film documentations of temporary drawings by Maryclare Foa.

Line Down Manhattan (2003) 7 :05 

An action: walking the length of Manhattan Island, dragging a chalk line from Broadway Bridge to Battery Park. The recorded sounds revealed (more than the images) the different communities and the material conditions of place- triggering my awareness of the vital and phenomenological affects of sound in relation to place.

House in Search of Belonging (2006) 13:20

A number of actions temporarily constructing a physical drawing of the outline of a house (from sticks), referencing Bachelard’s Dream House and a phenomenological response to locations associated with my life. ‘Through dreams the various dwelling places in our lives co–penetrate and retain the treasures of former days…’  (G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans M. Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1969. p5).

The Dissenters Driftsong (2009) 9:14

A multivoiced and collaborative vocal response to place (Bunhill Fields Cemetery), evidencing a sonic interaction between place and practitioner- this vocal drawing process is a phenomenological method employing the practitioners body as the drawing tool and the voice as material.

Artist’s Statement

Just as writing, singing, dancing, and scientific research (to name a few creative processes), are methods employed by practitioners to reinterpret, explore and investigate various phenomena, drawing is also employed by practitioners to reinterpret explore and investigate from the observing or imagining eye, ear and mind. In this way it may be said that the practitioner who employs drawing as a process may do so as a phenomenological enquiry.

During my PhD research; looking for evidence of interactions between outside environments and the practitioner while making work, I documented a number of different methods of drawing in response to place. I would define these drawings as having employed a phenomenological process because during the making of each drawing- whether walked, built or sung, a heightened awareness of the self in relation to place and vice versa was facilitated. The camera documented the different drawing processes, evidencing physiological, narrative, material, and emotional phenomena of the process, the context and the practitioner. And despite the temporary material of motion, trace, fleeting structure, and passing sound, the drawings contained within themselves the narrative and herstory of their own making.