I invited some friends to my house to take part in a drawing event in my bedroom. Relating to Derrida's ideas on hospitality, to begin with, we all sat and eat cake and drank tea in my room before starting the drawing so that I had a chance to explain the unusual drawing process and create an informal atmosphere for everybody to feel comfortable with the task.
We then all paired up and drew each other's faces to the sense of touch in complete darkness.
Drawing aim:
- to create a direct route of communication between both hands
- tactile information converted into visual information
The process:
- eliminate the sense of sight
- touch, feel and explore the partner's face with one hand
- move the hand that makes the mark simultaneously with the feeling hand
- consider how to translate the feeling of different textures like bone, muscle and tissue into appropriate marks, e.g. thick marks, smudged marks, fine marks etc.
Development/Artist link to process:
Claude Heath. Placing a strip of masking tape on our foreheads and a small amount of blu-tak on the page as reference points.
Writing as documentation
I've been interested recently in writing as a form of documentation, so I tried to write a creative descriptive piece about the event.
I saw a large wall covered in text by Richard Long at the Lisson Gallery in London and noticed the purposefulness of the layout of the text. This is something I have tried in my own piece of writing to draw attention to certain words, ideas and carefully phrased sections.
I have also included philisophocal theory towards the end which relates to Merleau-Ponty's ideas on touch; noting the importance of two surfaces coming into contact in a point of exchange with each other.
Six people. Three sets of partners.
Doused in the inky darkness of my bedroom:
feeling somebody’s face, feeling skin.
Bones, cartilage and muscles covered by skin.
Hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and lips.
Synchronising the feeling hand with the hand that creates marks.
Intimacy.
Ambiguous and unseen graphite marks on paper, observing
the experience of touch;
the point of exchange of two surfaces coming into contact.
The sensation of a warm cheek under cold fingers,
discovering discrete scars and indentations of a face I know so well.