Marking time: investigating drawing as a performative process for recording temporal presence and recalling memory through the line, the fold and repetition

Abstract

This research seeks to identify drawing as an alternative exemplar for investigating memory and temporal presence, while determining its potential as a performative tool for negotiation and transformation, throught the line, fold and repetition. The aim is to position drawing in the dynamics of movement, using the journey as a trope and the physical act of repeating the line to evoke memory and disrupt concepts of linear, orderly time. The investigation, driven by my ongoing practice and concerns of dislocation and exile, was inspired and informed by Gilles Deleuze's notion of 'becoming' as a fluid in-between. His reading of memory through Henri Bergson (habit and pure) and Marcel Proust(voluntary and involuntary), provided the context for examining drawing's memorial potency along a past-present-future continuum. Deleuze's ontology provided a reflective and reflecive methodology for addressing my own work alongside artists who share similar concerns. My practice focused on not what the line is but what it can do or be, where drawing is predicated on touch and derived from thought and memory, rather than appearance or observation. Inside the studio and outdoors in the landscape, moving between familiar yet changed places. I marked the paradoxical experience of time, its flows and ruptures. The resulting body of drawings and photographic records offer the principal outcome of this inquiry. The research findings present drawing as a fluid multiplicity that shifts between the haptic and optic, visible and invisible, control and chance, notation and photography, studio and street, with one often constituting the other. The condition of 'seeing' is not a prerequisite; drawing exists with and without seeing. It resides in a gap between, where time itself unfolds and things are forgotten as well as remembered, liminal and open-ended. This thesis proposes a new theoretical understanding of drawing as generative of memory and a process of continual negotiation and temporal becoming