My aim when initially working with a material, or materials, is to explore how we might draw together.
There is period of exploration, of play, where I note how my body interacts and behaves with a material, and a process and its agents of change. I most often approach this choreographically in order to find a series of instructions to play back into the materials when formally drawing with them.
It is often time-consuming and full of surprise and failure. I realise certain things aren’t possible. But I also know that the process makes way for ‘stangerness’ to arrive, and once strangerness has arrived a new way of drawing is often round the corner…
It is also a time to explore what both surface and mark might be, how they might be made and performed. What is surface? Something to approach, to land on, something that holds, that calls to be marked. Surface is the minus of traction, to the plus of mark. It is the dance floor. And what of mark? A line, a distinct form that differs from surface, an addition, a journey, a trace, evidence. Something placed, run along or carved into another. The dance.
I am only really interested in the unruly line - one that is faulty, derailed, fragile or transgressive.
I am quite new to papermaking. This naivety allows me to focus on what is happening, rather than on what should be achieved. In paper-making, Time, Pressure and Water become agents of surface. The addition and subtraction of water determines what the point of touch of mark and surface can be. Too little water and the paper breaks. Too much and it becomes dysfunctional or rots. Water has to be added and taken away at just the right moments and at the right time. A fluid surface graduates towards a solid one.
It is the gesture of press that has shown up in the choreography of making. It is surprising me. Press strengthens, binds and forms. Pressure is an agent. Here, the pressure unit must reach 400.
The surface calls to me marked by pressing. What if press becomes an agent of the mark too? Maybe this is how we can draw together…
