For this series of three drawings I explore the drawing process as a performance of pure mark making in relation to my body. The drawing and act of drawing, no matter the scale, is always limited and proportionate to the creator’s body. In what appears to be a single sweeping motion for each drawing the limitations of the creator become evident. Most of my work could be called process art and in many ways defined as conceptual art. For many of my projects the parameters of the work are predetermined. Here my intention was to repeat a single motion while holding a pencil and leave no space between the lines in an attempt to black out the surface for the length of the paper. For myself, what remains are the small spaces between the lines, a product or signifier of my humanness, of being perfectly imperfect.
Some of the physical limitations of my body are where I am located in space in relation to the paper, how far my arm holding a pencil can reach, and how tightly I can compact the lines while incrementally progressing. As an additional sensory element, to place the viewer in the experience or process of creating the drawings, I attached contact microphones to the drawing board and recorded the sound of the pencil making the marks. Here are three sample recordings of each drawing. Can you tell which sound is related to what drawing?
