The magnified glass of liberation: A review of fictional drawings

2024

The book brings together 23 authors who represent 18 critical and reflexive practices of drawing in design. It puts forward drawing as a form of research, a means to investigate, explore and gain a better understanding of an idea, a condition or a phenomenon. In the 18 chapters, drawing is presented as a practice that inquires, establishes its own temporality, constructs a dialogue and explores materiality. The texts engage drawing aesthetics (spatial, temporal, and material) and drawing ethics (investigating and making sense together) as well as four overarching themes: inquiry, time, dialogue and materiality —in drawing. Taken as a collective conversation on drawing practice, this book offers a shared reflection on the agency of drawing, on its potential to explore issues raised by our built and cultural environment, and on the ability of drawing to support and contribute to design research. It frames drawing as a research practice, one that is both deeply rooted in its disciplinary context and openly challenging its limits and conventions. —in Drawing adds to a continuing conversation on design research methods and the ethics and aesthetics of representation. It seeks to further establish the significance of drawing as a legitimate mode of inquiry across design disciplines and beyond.

2013

Thinking through Drawing: practice into knowledge 2011, Kantrowitz, A., Brew, A. & Fava , M.,eds., New York, 2012, Teachers College, ColumbiaUniversity, Art and Art Education Program.

Without and within: essays on territory and the interior, 2007

Before architecture appears in the world, it is proposed as an idea. The vehicle for that idea is the architect's drawing. Therein, the architect's intentions are portrayed, as are the intended architecture's relations to its viewers, users and its context. The architect's drawing therefore plays a significant part in representing a variety of intentions. The architect's drawing can appear in a variety of forms, each of which may be described as a picturing artefact, charged with realising the architect's intentions and projected fictions. These fictions are intended for the consumption of their patrons, viewers or readers. They are located in cultures in which they have currency, can be understood and identified with. They communicate their burden of ideas and ideology to complicit audiences. They represent therefore not only their authors' intentions, but something of their audiences' expectations. In this, the picturing artefact contains conventions and fictions of the architectural project that are invisible in architecture's realised, constructed state, and often rendered invisible by its very construction. The artefacts selected for study in this essay have been influential in the production of modern architecture. This is the first chapter of Without and within: essays on territory and the interior (Rotterdam: episode publishers, 2007)

Is a lack of a definition, a position of ambiguity, desirable in response to the question: what is drawing? This paper presents a view taken from two traditionally distinct fields: art and design; design and technology. This view is formed through the research collaboration and co-editorship of TRACEY: the journal of contemporary drawing, and the pedagogical development of a Masters programme in visualisation by the authors. This view is that a lack of definition is not only desirable, it is also a necessity. Our position is that the ambiguity that inevitably stems from a lack of definition forms a strategy that enables and sustains drawing research. Our collaborative experience is that drawing research is framed by assumptions that are embedded within art and design; design and technology. Historically, these fields have developed particular views about what drawing is, or what drawing is not. This paper will attempt to break down these assumptions from the place and space that evolves through the authors' ongoing experience of collaboration. From this place and space we will argue that there are a number of art / design categories of practice and research that ultimately describe something that is bounded (area / volume). These overlap, intersect, and perhaps like some long standing boundary war, vie for ownership of each other's domains. Drawing could be seen as one of these domains. However, we will argue that drawing is unbounded, that there is no 'expanded field', and that drawing's ubiquity necessitates a lack of definition, a position of ambiguity.

Design and Technology Education: An International Journal, 2012

Abstract This paper starts from the premise that drawing can be a means of visualising thinking, with an emphasis on the process involved. A gap often seems to exist in the minds of students of visual/material creative fields in ideas- generative contexts, between thought and action. The thesis is that the gap between thinking and doing can bereduced to being near simultaneous, in this instance through drawing. The methodology is practice-based, with a range of contribution from mid-program and final year students of communication design. Drawing is both the means and the subject of the research. The paper introduces the research’s theoretical basis, considers its application and concludes with subsequent development. Some of the students' practical work and linguistic responses illustrate points of the text. The research suggests that at prior or early stages of the design process the relative autonomy of the medium itself can offer visual/material suggestions and objects. Due to the ongoing nature of their practice, the students themselves have moved the research on from its original premise. The paper concludes by proposing to continue the research by observing how one can think about and rationalise one’s visual perception of movement at the moment of engagement in the drawing process. Keywords learning, participatory approaches, experience, creativity, Philosophy, design practice, teaching

2021

Part of a comprehensive studio design project, the exercise presented in this paper is a vehicle to investigate design thinking processes and how students construct intentions. The theme is the book and media. The semester's project begins with seminars on the history of books. The discussion delves into a book's craftsmanship and as a symbol for embodied knowledge and progresses to the roles books have played in society. Expanding the theme, discussion leads to the question of a book's preservation (vault) or its destruction in a digital society (memorial). The exercise is contingent upon the opposition created between the two spheres inherent to the title, Vaults versus Memorials. It positions the student in a manner that resists allocation to one sphere or another, an impetus for restructuring specified spheres according to new schemas. Written texts play an interlocutory role during the production of students' drawings. Each of the assigned texts offers an entry point to a tacit learning situation and a restructuring of semantic fields. With reference to Paul Ricoeur's research on interpretation theory, a mental distancing between text and drawing exposes students to ambiguities and the realization that prejudices play a role in understanding and interpreting meaning in the production of a visual work. The act of drawing produces its own frame of reference that we trace in three modes of production. These can be categorized as metaphoric interaction, textual dissection, and the guess. Vaults versus Memorials establishes a dialectical situation between explanation and understanding which lends itself to an open investigatory process. With the expansion of theme through drawing and by the depth of inferred meanings, students can speculate as to which interpretation is the most plausible fiction establishing probable, subjective criteria to carry forward during later stages of the design.

University of the Sunshine Coast, 2017

This study evolved from a need, as practitioner and teacher, to understand the foundations of my drawing practice. It examines a series of questions including what, how and why do I draw? Throughout the enquiry I sought to understand the nature of drawing practice and how the strands of thinking and making contained within drawing intersect. The research project considers how drawing, operating as knowledge and experience, represents a particular way of coming to know the world. This is reflected in an overarching question: What is the relationship between experience and its interpretation through drawing? The study examines drawing in the landscape and the studio through a series of drawing cycles which relate to particular landscapes in Europe and Australia. The research questions were examined through three cycles of enquiry which built on prior findings as the project progressed. The study draws on phenomenology, and particularly the writings of Merleau-Ponty, to examine shifts that occur between drawings in-situ and their interpretation in the studio, in order to reflect the memory and experience of particular landscapes. Merleau-Ponty’s (1964a) notion of the ‘Seer’ and ‘Seen’ was employed to balance the subjective viewpoint of the artist with the objective stance of the researcher. Drawing was used as a research methodology in order to consider creative outputs that were both descriptive and interpretive. https://www.usc.edu.au/art-gallery/exhibitions-and-programs/seer-and-seen-alex-ashton

Buildings, 2013

If, as I have argued elsewhere, architecture and archaeology share homological correspondences of common origin thus enabling analogical relationships of creative juxtaposition, then it becomes possible to characterise those correspondences through their representational drawing practices as they are embodied in the products of those practices and in the instruments which make those products. This characterisation is the subject of this paper, first by examining architecture and archaeology as disciplined suites of practices nurtured and developed within the constraints of their parent profession, and then through the examination of particular drawing techniques and instruments-techniques and instruments either common to each discipline or abandoned by them. These commonalities and abandonments reveal their undisciplinary nature. This loosening of disciplinary constraint is further examined through the analysis of "undisciplined drawing" case studies.

TRACEY Journal, 2012

The paper takes the idea of a journey, both actual and metaphorical, for the consideration of questions of process in drawing. The actual journey concerns myself, along with a group of university lecturers from our regular design faculty, who traveled to a similar faculty in Korea on a short-term visiting basis for purposes of working with 1st year design students from three specialist programs. This enabled an educational context for me to introduce drawing as part of a process-based visual thinking methodology, in this instance also in relation to a brief to enable students to participate in a mime festival. Equally, I present my interest in drawing via a small project of my own conducted in tandem with the students’ project, the emphasis of both projects being on movement and space. The latter related phenomena are considered both practically and theoretically, with occasional reference to interests specific to the actual journey and its location.