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Accepted Paper:

Enactive copying: a first person methodology for investigating thinking processes and the nature of knowledge gained from practice  
Patricia Cain (University of Glasgow)

Paper short abstract:

Investigating the time-honoured method of copying used by artists has enabled one practitioner to consider drawing as an enactive practice that invokes inherent reflexive thinking and makes visible to us how we make sense of what we do.

Paper long abstract:

This paper relates to my investigation of how and what artists learn by using the time-honoured method of copying. The method of enactive copying which has evolved suggests that drawing invokes an inherent reflexive mode of thinking which makes visible to us how we make sense of what we do.

Taking up Varela's ideas that emergent thinking arises through complex and recursive patterns between an individual and her environment, and is presentable in action and accessible through experience (Varela et al. 1991) allows me to consider drawing as an enactive process - an end in itself, rather than a finite event towards the production of an artefact: the focus becomes the evolution of the practitioner rather than the evolution of the drawing.

Questioning whether I can inhabit Richard Talbot's thinking processes by re-enacting his Glass drawing, required me to let go of my usual preconceptions and habitual practices, and take on Talbot's processes, working through these by drawing.

Becoming consciously aware of how I identify and demonstrate through drawing, key qualities in Talbot's process and how he establishes a framework to create opportunities for transformative experiences, provides insight into the relational nature of what I know: acknowledging my part in the process and taking what I know as a process back into my own drawing practice,

Enactive copying makes visible tacit processes in activity via our ability to make sense of what we do. Revealing the gesture of our thinking in this practical way may be useful in other historical and cultural contexts.

Panel P12
Something borrowed, something new? Practices and politics of imitation
  Session 1