CoLab Body & Place Residency 2024- Photo credit: Hells Gibson
Photo credit: Hells Gibson
Photo credit: Hells Gibson
Photo credit: Hells Gibson
collaborative drawing with Weronica Siwiec
collaborative drawing with Weronica Siwiec
Photo credit: Hells Gibson
We get closer to the artist through drawing
“The question of the drama of recording of the visible and making visible is also related to how lines are drawn between objects and subjects, so, in the most abstract sense the future of drawing relates both to how lines are drawn as both visibility, but also as a way of mapping the invisible contours of the future.” Jonathan Miles
I didn’t recognise you.
From a distance you didn’t look like you
You walked differently
Held your body in a different way
You must go again.
She was glad to have me back
and imploring me to leave at the same time.
There was no doubt, the experience had opened something new within me
And she could see it from the other side of the carpark as I approached.
There is a freedom in drawing, it’s immediate. It is forever teetering on the edge of becoming something else. There are abstract qualities to drawing, stains, erasure, gesture. Drawing shares the same qualities of poetry, a directness a continual relationship of Absence to Presence. The process of drawing is a midpoint between the two. It is a presentation of the event happening, a presencing. Whether we are making the marks or looking on in a gallery we are sharing the moment that something came into being. Cy Twombly states that “everything lives in the present, it’s the only time it can live,” perhaps drawing is the closest way to time travel back to the instant when the energetics of the moment arrived on the page?
Let me take you back to last Spring.
I was on a week long drawing residency in the Cotswolds with the CoLab.
After a week of continual drawing exercises, looking, listening, feeling, swapping, risking, wandering and revising- our visual memory banks were full.
An abundance of materials allowed us to risk, pristine paper lost its value in staying unmarked in the landscape and lost its preciousness back in the studio too.
On the last morning I found a place in the landscape. I abandoned my rigid drawing board and lay my paper directly on the ground. The earth beneath the paper informed the charcoal marks made on top. My view shifted as I moved around the curve of a tree trunk- the perspective of the drawings following suit. Each time I made a drawing I stepped into it in order to the make the next one. Walking my materials forward- I left a trail of drawings behind me.
In the afternoon our activities returned to the studio. Bringing a tree branch with me and placing it under the paper I established an instant horizon line. I was ready to cash in the hours spent on location and draw down from it.
With no external visual reference, only that which existed inside my head I began making marks in an unconscious way. I was drawing what “the drawing wants to draw, what is invisible to the naked eye” in the words of Helene Cixous.
I worked on large, oversized paper together now with Weronica Siwiec one of my fellow artists. We had worked alongside each other all week. I knew and trusted her hand.
The image began to arrive through a series of ruptures. This is what drawing is, the appearance of something, the arrival onto the page, a first port of call for the creative, unconscious to land.
Now the portal was open and energetics poured forth. In such a state of flow we felt empowered to allow it to become a game between us. A free place for release and joy. Creative freedom took over. Two mark-makers issuing each other challenges, a joyful jousting back and forth with drawing instruments. A second image quickly emerged. We dared each other to let go, to play, with friction, with tension, working to hold the space between us. The only risk to our process was one of spectacle. Derrida was there cheering us along from the sidelines as we “work(ed) to preserve the trace whilst at the same time losing (ourselves) and it.
We made many drawings that week, they were all a record of the moment, endless records of time and place and it ended with an opening of a space with two oversized collaborative drawings. It was exhaustive, energising and revelatory. Walter Benjamin sums the experience of creating these drawings well when he says “the image is that moment where the past enters like a lightning bolt into the constellations with the now. Image becomes dialectics in a standstill.”
Sharyn Wortman 2025
