Drawing register. A line of thinking

Carless, Tonia

Abstract

This outlines an on-going archival project of discursive drawing practice. It documents a process of developing spatial theory through practice and a form of spatial resistance as a collaborative, shared representation and a public discourse.

The drawings have emerged from a critical study of a city redevelopment space and how architectural drawings prefigure space on the ground. They question the instruments of developer capitalism through the precise traces of everyday life.

Group drawings are performed which are a threshold between public and private space, drawing what is to be seen and what was there in relation to the subjective experience of the space, as well as its social or material histories. It is understood also to be a form of active design of the space, tracing future conditions through imaginary realms.

The drawings are of specific sites and sights that are localised and provincial but which hold the potential to develop new knowledge of the wider conception of the space of globalisation. They are made on site (en plein air) as part of a collaborative draw-in and an activist visual research analysis. They are considered as counter to the proliferation and ephemeral nature of digital representations. They are exhibited (circulated) as prints, as multiples and this is documented as a drawing register and archive.

Drawings include a hand drawn 17 metre panorama perspective, drawings uploaded onto a planning portal website as a protest and public discourse, sketch ink and watercolour drawings made into postage stamps and dyeline drawing prints. The project questions the knowledges and understandings of drawings. It has the utopian ambition to challenge the dominant ideologies of spatial reconfiguration, combining hand drawings and printed media to trace and develop social histories of space.

Citation

Carless, T. (2018). Drawing register. A line of thinking

• Digital Artefact Type: Other
• Conference Name: Disegno 2018 Mastery and Uncertainty The drawings of Architecture. An International Colloquium and Exhibition
• Start Date: Jan 17, 2018
• End Date: Jan 21, 2018
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2018
• Keywords: drawing, discourse, social, histories, space