Lost in Drawing: Locating Self within Dissolved Boundaries

Abstract

'Lost in Drawing: Locating Self within Dissolved Boundaries' uses iterative production methods to create an archive of materials seen through a qualitative analytical lens. Drawings of each series are responses to the designing of an experience. The action involved in drawing is as important to the work as the drawing outcome.

The study explores spatial conditions held within 'dissolved boundaries' and expanded thresholds. 'Lost' as a condition is explored through both idea, and material fabrication, examples being to lose oneself and lost material casting. A series of diagrams and mappings assist in analysing the drawing experiments, during their production. One important diagram that emerged from the research became an underpinning theme in the project, named here 'fixed and free', which refers to balancing bounded structures with free and unbounded space.

The lead research methodology underpinning the creative practice is 'embodied intuitive drawing'. An assemblage of experiments was compiled from mainly analogue media and worked towards an objective digital analytical transmedia outcome. These analyses are threaded throughout the exegesis, which is called 'reworking the work'. To communicate this process, the recording of experiments formed a catalogue, interspersed throughout the thesis.

The thesis is located in the expanded drawing practice field of research and responds primarily to New Zealand artist Hannah Beehre's text and her ideas relating to 'Drawing in Flow'. A second key source referred to is USA art theorist Sofia Banou and her discussions on expanded drawing. The exegesis is divided into three chapters structured around thematic chapter headings of Drawing Out, Drawing Over and Drawing Attention. The study investigates the dissolution of fixed boundaries, challenging binary ways of thinking that often limit how we understand space and identity.

Analysing through a spatial lens, dissolving bounded spaces introduces expanded threshold conditions, and perception becomes key in navigating these in-between spaces. The thesis uses experimental autoethnographic ideas that explore the subtle discomforts in the experience of navigating everyday controlled spaces and the built environment shaped by neurotypical expectations.

'Lost' as a condition is circled back to, in every section of the exegesis, highlighting the thesis question; How might drawing practices dissolve bounded conditions of self and spatial environments?