Formative Assessment

Week 1:  

Reflection on Manu Aluli Meyers talk: There is always interconnection. We are never alone – and the best type of knowledge is that which we can pass on. However, we cannot do this without first however being open to ‘see’. We must become an eye. Tacit knowledge is passed down – embedded in our psyche, integral to place. We must be able to identify who we are and where we come from, our whakapapa, our lineage, to trace back to what we always knew. This is when we can begin to share ourselves. Be a bell, waiting to be struck – and the note people hear. Meyers states that we must live always for the place that we know is wide and expansive in our hearts and minds, and that this is the root of all knowledge.  

Reflection on Lesley-Ann Noel: Breaking down barriers, Lesly Ann Noels work is critical in helping emerging designers familiarize themselves with the insidious injustice that fills the world, and how their practice can address it. It also makes it apparent that these issues embedded in our culture are something equally embedded in our practice, and as designers it must be addressed. There is an interesting connection between Ann Noels work and Meyers work, in that both aim to secure senses of identity within us. Their work challenges us to know ourselves and our contexts, to be able to understand the culture. Knowledge underlines each partitioners work – and what we do not know is just as important as what we have always known. It all links to this idea of letting yourself become an ‘eye.’  

Notes and Questions:  

Why is my research important now?  Are we losing touch with the world? Do we explore anymore? Has place been dismissed? At this time of turning inwards to our homes, what constitutes home anymore? Is there a difference between public/private realm at all? Can epistemological theories be beneficial in thinking about knowledge gained through place, hidden by place too? Does place have tacit knowledge in itself?

Neighbourhood of practice:  

Kate Newby, Katie Patterson, Richard Long, Anne Hamilton, Rachel Whiteread, Lee Mingwei, Yona Lee, Ana Mendieta, Tarryn Handcock, Michelle Stuart, Rei Neito, Robert Smithson, Bianca Hester, Cornellia Parker… 

Jane Rendel, Tim Ingold, Marcel Proust, Gaston Bachelard, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, Sarah Ahmed, Durga Chew-Bose, Junichiro Tanizaki, Andrez Corbos, Juhani Pallasmaa,  Walter Benjamin Le Corbusier, Rufus Knight, Katie Lockhart… 

 

WEEK 2 -Practise Annotation

Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.

Tim Ingold traverses new terrain in this study of the line. Distilling the significance of drawing, scripting and inscribing, Ingolds translation of the line seeks to define it as fundamental as it is omnipresent. Adopting anthropologic and historic contexts within Traces, Threads and Surfaces the line is revealed as witness across ethnographic conditions, interpreted and scripted across cultures. Studying people and things demands a study of the lines that constitute them calling to a web of creatives – from storytellers to draftsmen(*).

Ingold approaches traces and threads through historical contexts. These contexts range from Greek lore of the Labyrinth to South Indian threshold Kolam drawings. This form of analysis ensures reliability, and makes for an insightful resource library. Interestingly, surface becomes a critical component inseparable from the line. It is here I find myself intrigued, as Ingold cites Richard Long’s Line Made by walking, which challenges drawing as simply an additive or redactive gesture. In Long’s work, downtrodden blades of grass are animated by light, drawing a path in a landscape he has repeatedly traveled. Traces of animals’ paths are fossilized in rock, allowing future study of patterns, tethered to place.(*) Tacit knowledge of water sources, or even the line of scent, is brought into question as line making acts. As surface and materiality is critical to my practice, Ingolds conceptions of trace resonate. Threads offer new means to integrate my methods, perhaps suggesting I adopt a textile approach. Upon reflection, Ingolds implementation of lines offers invaluable  knowledge for my own research proposal. In particular, the metaphysical and spiritual confrontations that weave amongst the work offer philosophical musings on my poetic inquiry into line-making and spatial drawing. Alchemical implications are imbued into lines, namely within the labyrinth of Knossos,  in which Ingold dreams the subterranean maze as something of collective imaginary. It brings to mind  Gaston Bachelard’s dreams of the cellar: a deep, unsettling place that lingers in our dreams, a trace, and a thread into darkness. A textile is derived from a thread, but its surface isn’t the knot, but the space it occupies (*). Ingold writes that the  tool  which draws and the surface in which it inscribes go hand in hand (*). This challenges  my practice to consider the implement as much part of a drawing as the drawing itself.   In much the same way, Ingolds musings on lines have been inscripted onto the surface of my research proposal.

WEEK 3 & 4

Find above 6x draft annotations (formatting to be completed)

DRAFT INTRODUCTION

My Contextual Field:

The contextual field I’m engaged with sees quite a holistic blend. From novels and essays to film and art practice, I try to immerse myself within a broad field of context – as this is the source of all my inspiration. Writers Gaston Bachelard, Benjamin Walter, Marcel Duchamp, Junchiro Tanizaki, Juhani Pallasmaa ground my practice in their spatial writings. Authors Annie Dillard and Durga Chew-bose offer examples of writers out of my field, but inspire my thinking nonetheless.  Practitioners offer context that I always aim  to situate myself amongst. They include Kattie Patterson, Kate Newby, Lee Mingwei, Rachel Whiteread, Michelle Stuart, Rei Neito, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Peter Zumthor, Bianca Hester and Cornellia Parker to name a few. These people are interested in similar ideas I find, yet their methods vary entirely. I see their methods as vehicles for them to communicate these ideas, in ways that work to their strengths. Rei Neitos work  stirred a revelation of my own. Her concerns with reflecting the world we inhabit through quiet gestures is breathtaking. She writes on how she simply wants to share the ephemerality and fragility of the things that affect her deeply. How Naito makes us become aware of space, in a place we’re not sure what to make of propels my aim in heightening the quiet spirituality that suggests something is happening in a place. There are invisible forces at play, and to passerbys, what’s happening might not meant to be obvious, but instinctively felt. Naito asks “what kind of place is earth”, what is our relation to it ? Questions her work proposes aren’t easily answered, let alone understood, but it’s in the act of becoming aware of something, that our relationship to it changes.  I see conversations  with my teachers an invaluable informal context. A turning point was signaled by  a mentor asking  how my practice was generous. This is a primary context I feel I will now always refer to when making work. 

2x seminal texts: 

Lines: A Brief History by Tim Ingold

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard 

Draft Abstract

Drawing Sites investigates place-making as a daily practice of intentionally locating oneself within their dwelling sites. In this practice-led research inquiry, drawing is called on as a potent tool in ‘reading’ these spaces. Considering dwelling by way of topoanalysis, the interrelationships between home, self, and neighbourhood are paralleled by a personal pilgrimage. This autoethnographic study into dwelling spaces discusses the embodied phenomena of place: Sounding an entanglement between home, body, and memory. Resisting this digital era, Drawing Sites turns to New Ageism, in radical opposition to the wireless forces vying for our attention; One of the most precious – and overdrawn – resources we have. Calling to the bygone era, the research seeks to address how a newfound spatial agency might be arrived at through nostalgic ideals. Home is investigated as a domestic space, yet also how home might be found in nature and other common sites. Home arises, for example, in ancestral bodies of water, offering space for intergenerational connection. Lines are traced between identity, place and spatial artefacts. Drawing Sites employs analogue practice, turning away from an immaterial time. Engaging with dwelling sites as a nexus of materialities – encountered through durational, lived, and nonhuman times – the research offers modes of apprehending the complex sedimentations of our home. The resulting artefacts from this process will culminate in an installation, drawing with and from dwelling sites material imaginaries. Unearthing site through drawing calls on Freudian notions of ‘dream work’ – unearthing the subconscious. Encountering a neighbourhood by foot, the research hinges on sight: what we see, why we see, and how we see. Tensions arise between the observed, the invisible, the secret and unsaid. If the things we observe define our lives, Drawing Sites frames one’s intimate, perpetual encounter with their home bodies.