Great Apes gesture and draw

The Horizontal Arc gesture of the Great Ape has been studied by Dr John Matthews, at the School of Visual and Performing Arts, National Institute of Education, Singapore. Such gestures, made by the Apes at his approach, appear to define their personal space.

Mathews suggested that expression and representation are not limited to humans, more deeply opening up the question ‘What is art?’ (John Mathews video presentation, Art in Early Childhood conference, Armidale NSW, 2006)

Animating the gesture I had seen on the video, I found a connection with my own experience: a move that I make in Tai Chi. In this way, I was able to connect with the Great Ape’s gesture.
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Struggling with my own balancing act between making, reading and writing, I find in her paper, Drawing to Know, that Patricia Cain struggled too:

I keep hedging my bets, with plan, reading of chapters and timetables; when I know the only way is really to give up and immerse myself in drawing and observing my own experience. (2006; 15)

Cain is a lawyer as well as an artist. She writes in a way I can grasp, about things I know from experience. How she writes, what she says, and her research methodology, are relevant to my journey.

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Mark Palmer’s words summing up the relationship between theory and practice in the context of PhD research had been running through my mind each time I came out of the library; “If you start with a project, you’ll find that you spend time seeking a theoretical framework to “explain” the work. Theoretical work should address the same problem as practice, not attempt to explain or justify decisions made about the work. Unless you do this, you’ll find that your “theory” will be doomed to lack any literal coherence, as having been doomed to “explain” your practice it clusters around the work rather than working through the work with any rigour”. (Palmer 2003) (2006;17)

Starting out this research, I had no idea how my practice in drawing, and animating, and making objects, could be used to find what interests me so much: what changes people who work in Antarctica can see in its landscape. With no preconception of what that would look like, I could not call it a project. But as I got into it, I found myself building things that could have been projects, if I’d allowed that: an Antarctic thesaurus, for example, or a series of journeys, illustrated by my artwork. I instead use these forms as places to house the Antarctic texts, that accumulate through interviews, and on-line dialogue. I have been drawing, animating and making objects in response to these texts. These physical, non-verbal responses, are gestures through which I get to know my own connections with the texts, and the changing landscape they reference.

I relate to Cain’s thought:

I could identify that knowledge which accumulated during the process of drawing occurred in a manner which led from ‘not knowing’ to ‘coming to know’, and was less to do with problem solving and more to do with problem finding. (2006;2)

The sort of problem finding I experience in drawing and animating is concerned with mark making and gesture. How does the work use space, time and energy, to reveal something previously unknown? How can the gestures and marks work together, to make sense in a non-verbal, non-linear way? The problems are found through a dialogue, between myself and the material, and myself and external stimulus. Through this dialogue, the work achieves a life of its own.

Maintaining ambiguity throughout the [process by sustaining the dialectic between not knowing and knowing seemed important to keep a drawing ‘alive’. (2006;5)

Animation can be used to reveal transformations, from not knowing to knowing.

Picasso, for example, drew an image on glass, which was time-lapsed from beneath. His ‘problem finding’ was recorded on film.

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Posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008