The Drawing Journal
Drawing, writing, what expeditions, what wanderings, and at the end, no end, we won’t finish, rather time will put an end to it. (Helene Cixous Stigmata London: Routledge 1998)
The drawing Journal is a collaborative art project investigating the materiality of and relationship between text and drawing and the possibility to translate one through the other.
Group members send each other excerpts of creative writing, drawings and personal objects for mutual examination and re-interpretation. Drawn images are described through text, and prose visualized through drawing.
Drawing is more than graphite on paper. The meanings and subtexts drawings generate are akin to that of writing poetry, fiction or a musical score. The act of writing, like drawing, is a gesture embodied leaving more than a trace.
Through this interaction the artists co-inhabit the texts and the images. It is the translation performance of drawing to text, and text to drawing that contributes to creating meaning, and beyond, the reader, spectator, or audience that construct meaning.
The significance of storytelling within traditional Irish culture is prevalent in the work, the history of passing down and preserving memories and morals in Irish folklore using pictures, spoken word and writing resonates with the concerns of the project and artists.
Membership: Niamh Clarke, Hannah Clegg, Daniel Coleman, Shauna McDonald, Sharon McKeown and Doris Rohr. All artists are so far connected by having worked or studied at the Belfast School of Art, University of Ulster.
The Drawing Journal 