drawing with garden

This drawing project was created during my time at The Glasgow School of Art. It distorts observational drawing by including the subject within the mark-making process as an equal collaborator. It unveils a negotiation within a more-than-human community congregated in my back garden. The place provides porous reliefs, colouring materials, and parallel rhythms of activity to which I have become more attentive through diverse experiments.

In-between two brick walls almost collapsing and covered by ivy, the garden links the back of the house and the neighbourhood lane. Humans use to walk on the concrete pathway for throwing away bins or smoking cigarettes. This way is half covered by soil and moss as a continuity of the vegetal parts. Slugs of many sizes and colours live protected in this humid environment generously watered by the rain of Glasgow — maybe slugs are attracted by the rest of a wooden patio, whose planks are decomposing. There is no grass and even wild herbs are scarce. A spindle remains in the company of a few tall and thin ash, where birds appreciate to have a break in their stroll, but not for inhabiting.

The drawing process starts with patient research of the particular zone where the actors’ interaction is the most manifest. The ‘tactile connection’ happens first with hands perceiving the reliefs of things differently than the eyes do. After this long time, hands perceive through paper, creating folds to be marked definitively with graphite. These contacts product connected layers of information: an embossing, dark tracks and an imprint of the porous materials in the back.

Another series engages less of the observer in revealing the tactility of rain, whose residual humidity engraves rotting leaves on the paper whose structure can be altered, e.g. by successive frosts and slugs’ hunger. The ownership of these creations is shared with the garden to which I modestly presented some prompts to recompose and expand. The dates written or cut on the sheet add a temporal dimension to this slow process of alteration spanning over wintery months.