Output details

Drawing Connections

Edited volume of invited essays engaging with drawing practices as they are used and theorised across several disciplines, and forming part of the NSEAD series ‘Readings in Art and Design Education’. My contribution specifically examines my development and journey as an artist, the role that drawing has played in that development, and the symbiotic relationship that my practice has to my engagement with art historical questions around the nature, history and use of linear perspective.

Deliberately personally reflective in parts, it traces the interplay between making sculpture and making drawings, describing key questions that drove the making of work. In particular, it describes and analyses the role that a practical and critical engagement with various modes of depiction, and specifically, the history and practice of Linear Perspective has played within that journey. It subsequently relates and draws parallels between specific problems, questions, intuitions and insights that have arisen in my practice – theoretical, technical and philosophical, to the historical, cultural and philosophical and technical debates and arguments surrounding the development/discovery/invention of linear perspective. The essay, in the context of the purpose and subject matter of the book, thus uniquely attempts to bring into relief the specific insights and knowledge, gained through both creative practice and in-depth engagement with technical aspects of a subject, that an artist can bring to a historical discussion; the essay discusses how studio practice and studio ‘research’ has led me to a critical position regarding assumptions and orthodoxies in current and historical thinking about the nature and purpose of linear perspective; - the orthodoxies that have driven the arguments of many of the most significant commentaries on linear perspective, for example Damisch, Kemp, Bryson, Goodman and Panofsky.