Paper short abstract:

The joint paper highlights contradictory notions of the ephemeral associated with materialising thought through drawing/writing. Clarke is concerned with re-description of photo or text in drawing. Rohr explores embodied and performative drawing/writing practices that imply duration and mortality.

Paper long abstract:

This joint paper/ presentation attempts to scrutinise further the contradictory notion of the ephemeral associated with materialising creative thought processes through drawing/writing. Writing and drawing transcend materiality as making and interpreting text/image go beyond the realm of annotation. Even though all artworks have surplus meaning constructed through both maker/author and the viewer (co-author) material presence is frequently considered more explicit in painting, sculpture, textile needlework, woodcarving (etc), than drawing. The craft of drawing, is complex and hybrid, more akin to writing processes. To illustrate this, Niamh Clarke argues that Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves has found visual transcription in Vija Celmins's Ocean drawings - in the sense that processes of writing or drawing are a means of embodying and making physical through gesture. Re-description informs Clarke's own practice of drawing from photographic source material.

Doris Rohr takes an interest in drawings associated with duration (performance; narrative; journal), as closely aligned with the physical embodied presence of the human hand. Yet one hesitates to call the body material - as a living entity the body is mortal rather than material. Digital drawing and design further undermines a clear distinction between material and immaterial, or virtual. Robert Smithson's Heap of Language (1966) presents text as drawing in a state of composting (humus). Materiality and anti-materiality seem to feed each other in drawing in a poetic science of matter and anti matter.