Image from the site-responsive installation at Uillinn West Cork Arts Center Residency
“...drawing is a manual activity whose aim is (...) to turn appearances and disappearances into a game that is more serious than life,” says John Berger in his letter to Jim Elkins (p 109 -110)
I add a line to my drawing on the wall - movement appears. Another line - movement disappears. A few more dots, and the drawing falls apart into space. A good few more, and a wave emerges. What am I chasing here? After a while, I realize that I'm after a feeling I experienced in the Arctic. A sensation of being more alive. But what is it to feel ‘more alive’? For me it is a heightened awareness of existence - of being part of everything else. In a conversation with Piotr Brysacz a Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk suggests that humans have a metaphysical need to take part in something greater than themselves - something that transcends them. And space fulfills that need. ("Patrzac na Wschod", p. 22) I believe making art can bring me a small piece of that feeling back. And John Berger writes in the same letter that drawing “is as fundamental to the energy that makes us human as singing and dancing” (p. 109).
Drawing is also about seeing - and about not seeing. I have to leave my studio to truly see the drawing again. When I work too long, I stop seeing it. And as I type this, a thought arises: isn’t life like that too? I stop seeing the parts of life I’ve become too used to. Maybe, on Monday morning, as I prepare lunch for my daughter, I should leave 'the room' for a second too, then come back and see it all over again. See her, sitting there in carefully chosen clothes (and really see them!) and hear her asking if all wood has to be oiled. She leaves ‘her room’ far more often than I do. Being young, she hasn’t yet grown accustomed to life.
When I was in my 20s I wrote a text for an art book which my sister and I were working on together. In it, I described a dream I had: I was in a kind of yoga class, where they asked me to bite my own arm - to push beyond my own limits. I started wondering - what if you could step outside yourself, just for a moment? Step out, have a coffee, throw the litter away, see yourself from the outside, and then step back in. How wonderful that would be.
Later in life, I learned that certain experiences let you, help you, or force you to step outside yourself. Or you just need more time. You see it, but you can’t change it. Still, seeing it can change your present perception of yourself. Like me now, reading a text I wrote many years ago.