Finding Lines

Hello, my name is Katie and I am doing a 4-week placement at Derby Museum. I am Nottingham Trent University student, studying Museum and Heritage Development. The main project that I’m involved with is creating a series of videos that reflect the development process leading up to May 10th; the museum late event we have.

My first week has certainly flung me into the world of museum life quickly, hitting the ground running at every corner and bend. It’s been eventful, meeting such a lot of new people, and learning about the processes that occur. For example, I’ve particularly enjoyed getting some of the drawers ready – from using masking tape to remove any elements of dirt, to screwing screws back into place; it’s been an eye-opening week.

As I’ve immersed myself into this world, I’ve tried to capture, vlog and video as much as I can. The first few days were huge learning curves; transition shots of people walking, for instance, are just as important as filming someone handle an object. Also, ensuring that the correct style of background music used has been a wonderful challenge to explore and develop.

The first week’s vlog was interesting to film and edit, and I only hope to develop my skills as the placement progresses. It provides a short snapshot of the week I’ve had here in the World Cultures gallery at Derby Museum.

I made my first line drawings a few years ago - they were an attempt to say something about weaving, drawing and story telling - for the Holmfirth Festival, in West Yorkshire, exploring the town’s textile history and in particular its Luddite activity. It was claimed that 450 men were ‘twisted-in’ to secret Luddite societies in the town in a doomed attempt to protect their livelihoods against the introduction of new technologies and working practices.

The basic mechanism of weaving - two interlaced vertical and horizontal threads that are woven to form cloth - is a potent metaphor for the community, belonging and strength that Luddism offered Holmfirth’s beleaguered textile workers.

I carried on making what I called ‘jigged drawings’. Drawing with the aid of a simple tool (a ruler) - and completed in one sitting - or standing, as I had to reach across and around the A1 paper to rule the many closely packed lines that formed the drawing. The drawing became an activity about drawing itself, about stamina and duration and drawing correctly. I used carbon paper so that each drawing automatically created a copy of itself because I also wanted to say something about production and automation – and how the machine became the substitute for the hand.

Faint is a new iteration of these ‘Luddite drawings’.

Each drawing is the result of a durational and physical exercise that relies on concentration and stamina, and which is always imperfect, because in doing it I can never match the precision of the computer (although the carbon copy nods to the perfect copying of the photocopier and the printer) or the rules I have set myself.

Each drawing is a copy of its original. The carbon copy is an ‘automatic’ record of the act of drawing; it captures all the mistakes I make: the slips, smudges, misalignment and movement - and replicates them.

The drawing is of nothing - not some thing - and the copy of the drawing is a record of my all too human fallibility - of a desire to make mistakes and get things done.

I’m fascinated by human beings.  

As a writer, speaker and coach specialising in creativity, I use art as a means of giving voice to that which words alone cannot express.  

My current work explores the role that the super ego/inner critic plays in stifling creativity and how we can shine a positive light on shame through art.  I use my art as a backdrop for talks and this year am speaking at TEDx and Cannes Lion on the subject of the Inner Critic. My big artistic influences are Daniel Johnstone, David Shrigley, Lynda Barry and my 10 year old daughter. 

Liz Atkin is an internationally acclaimed visual artist and advocate based in London. 

Art has become her greatest tool for recovery after Compulsive Skin Picking dominated her life for more than 20 years. Drawing refocuses her hands and mind wherever she is, Liz reimagines the body-focused repetitive behaviour of skin picking into photographic artworks, charcoal drawings and performances. 

Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Australia, Singapore, USA and Japan. She has given public talks for TEDx, Wellcome Collection and at a range of conferences and health events around the world. Her artwork and advocacy has featured on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, Metro, Huffington Post, Women’s Health USA, i, Mashable, BBC World Service and more. 

She’s known for her free #CompulsiveCharcoal drawings created on newspapers on public transport and gifted to passengers, she’s given away close to 10,000 drawings in the last year. 

Most recently Liz was at M1 Singapore Fringe Festival gifting drawings, sharing her story and running advocacy workshops at universities and hospitals.  

Photo: //www.davidjedge.uk

www.lizatkin.com

To occupy my hands I create free 1 minute drawings on discarded newspapers on public transport. I create up to 60 a day and give the drawings away to fellow passengers as advocacy for Compulsive Skin Picking and mental health, and as an act of kindness. In the last year, I’ve  created more than 10,000 free drawings in London, New York and Singapore.

 Pouring Mountains

As part of Finding Lines I’ll create a large performative drawing for opening event. Largely improvised, Pouring Mountains transposes the urge and energy of my Compulsive Skin Picking into a visceral charcoal drawing. These textural mountains are a radical re-thinking of a way to manage the disorder, the physical act of drawing helps release tension through my hands to the paper.

Photo: //www.davidjedge.uk

www.lizatkin.com

Drawing is simply an ongoing process for me, a studio based process led dialogue between myself and the materials. 

“There are no rules; drawing can be as minimal as a breath and as complex as the wave structures and recordings of the ocean. Drawing is kinaesthetic; a movement between points, a connection, recognition and gesture of any idea, mark, trace, line, symbol, shape, medium, space or surface”

Irene Barberis, from, The Good Drawing, CCW graduate school publications.

These drawings have absolutely everything in common with landscape, rural and urban. They are definitely not ‘abstract’ images. 

They resonate with half remembered images and sounds of Sheffield, the Peak District, Cornwall, motorway journeys, walks in the sun, the sky through the attic window, bike rides, cracks in the pavement…

“It is impossible for me to make a painting which has no reference to the powerful environment in which I live”. 

Peter Lanyon

Mixed media processes dominate with the use of pencil, charcoal, chalk, lead powder, collage and masking tape on paper. As a consequence of exploring what drawing is, they now include more fluid materials such as paint, varnish, dark room processes and found ‘urban detritus’ manipulated via the drawn visual language of tone, line, texture, shape and form.. Subsequently the drawings are evolving into audio 'versions’ or examinations of visual language through recorded, sampled, edited and looped arrangements.

A good drawing?

“A discourse between definition and the unresolved, the systematic and chaotic, certainty and speculation”.

Simon Betts, from, The Good Drawing, CCW graduate school publications.

The current drawings are very large - a little over eight feet wide and five feet high. It is physically demanding to make and move about. In fact it is almost ridiculous, but this takes me out of my comfort zone. 

The audio starts as recognisable ‘riffs’ from a bass or tuned percussion or even a voice but become ‘deconstructed’ via a desktop sampler. Chopped up, tuned up or down, looped, reversed, made more ‘granular’.

Both elements are constantly egging the other on to deconstruct, to choose the less obvious. To enable ‘all the insecurities and doubts of the working process’ to show themselves.

The studio is also becoming more intrinsically ‘part’ of the work. The audio samples are taken live through a microphone and as a consequence the audio detritus of adjoining industrial workshops, adjacent houses, aircraft flying over, etc, are integrated. Likewise the floor, walls, workbench introduce graphic glitches into the drawing process as I cut, rub, spray, scratch, rip and reassemble the paper. 

#drawing - a verb? It’s all about process, instinct, action, acute observation and memory…

stephen carley

www.stephencarley.co.uk

@stephen_carley

@c_y_h_m_n

We asked people "what does drawing mean to you?" To help us understand the part it plays in everyday lives. Thank you to the hundreds of people who responded openly, honestly and with humour. "

It’s a way to express ideas, gather meaning or a form of release.”

“Personally, because I’m rubbish at art, it means getting the lines wrong.”

“Pen/pencil and paper have become part of how I think, attend and imagine. I’m not so much a cyborg as a scribblorg.”

‘We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life?  Where is our body? Where is our space? George Perec (1936-82) 

For the past year or two I have used cheap duplicate books as sketchbooks to create 'carbon copy' drawings. In these books, I simply make a record of small incidents, encounters or memories, much like a diary. I enjoy maintaining a balance between the skills that come from the deliberate sustained practice of drawing and the delightful encounters with happenstance captured in the unexpected and uncontrollable qualities of the 'blind' copy.  This deliberate courting of the accidental helps to brings the drawings to life and makes way for the possibility of discovery.

 Looking and recording through a simple process of lines and marks on paper connects nicely with the images that are coming up under #findinglines.  Here we can see an engagement with the everyday by direct observation of line within daily routines.  I am interested in this close observation of the world around us.  A purposeful engagement with our immediate surroundings, that brings into focus the details of life that are often taken for granted or overlooked. There are images of lines created by the suns warmth on the frosty pathway, tracks through the damp grass from walking the dog, vapour trails in the beautiful clear blue of a summer sky.  These lines that overlay and interrupt the landscape we move through, both urban and rural, are reminiscent of the lines of a drawing that interrupt the blank page of the sketch book.

 Susan Kester

http://www.susankester.co.uk/

https://www.instagram.com/susan.kester/