How to Draw a Ghost

Abstract

This practice-led research examines Gothic materiality, specifically Lovecraftian literature, to visually convey spatial agency. The research structure of this project works as a circular migration between architecture, literature, theory, and illustration. This framework reflects the transcendence of the Gothic through realms of culture, space, and time.

Spilt into four stages of practice, this research utilises literary and contextual reviews, drawing methods, exhibition enactment and object-spatial rendering. These methods once again depend on each other as informants and follow the migration pattern of this exegesis.

This exegesis is the written documentation of this research project and includes the evidence and reflections of the making practice. How to Draw a Ghost concludes its research for this project with the end artefact of The Poet’s Bureau. This refurbished writing desk symbolises the migration of Gothicity and acts as a map of this project’s journey through its contextual fields. How to Draw a Ghost exemplifies the crossroads between architecture, literature, theory, and illustration. The findings of this research show how different sections of culture and academia can be fused to close the dichotomy between fiction and reality, tangible and intangible, animate and inanimate. How to Draw a Ghost navigates abstract theory through drawn lines, capturing a visual portrayal of spatial agency.