Paper short abstract:

My bad drawings help me to remember places much better than my good ones. Why? The answer may lay in the intersection of Aesthetics, phenomenology and notions of weaving and wayfaring, and Biesta's concept of experience of resistance as the hand struggles to draw what the embodied mind experiences.

Paper long abstract:

Travelers take photographs to remember places, to recall and reminisce about those experiences after they have returned home. Tommy Kane, a New Yorker artist and creative director, recently published a book of his on-location drawings titled All My Photographs Are Made with Pens. Kane is not a lone drawer but one of many who record their lifeworlds in their sketchbooks by hand, pen and ink and prefer drawing and painting to photographing just like Kane.

Drawing is a way of taking notes but it is also an artistic act with aesthetic qualities and considerations, and it is difficult to carry out an artistic act without having artistic goals and intentions. When viewing my own on-location drawings later on, I have, however, noticed an interesting tendency: my bad drawings ignite much stronger and detailed memories than those drawings I consider good in artistic terms. Some good ones even seem void of recollection.

In my presentation I will first shortly describe the experience of drawing and the embodied memory that a drawing can restore. Drawing inspiration from Gert Biesta's notion of the experience of resistance, I will consider drawing as a way of weaving oneself into a location, of becoming a part of the world it holds. The presentation will bring together concepts from Aesthetics (aesthetic engagement) and phenomenology (being-in-the-world, lifeworld, horizon), and connect them with Tim Ingold's notions of weaving and the practice drawing as wayfaring, as biding oneself into the texture of the world.