TRACEY - Drawing and Visualisation Research
https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php/TRACEY
<p>TRACEY | Journal has been publishing drawing and visualisation research and practice since 1997. Published by Loughborough University and affiliated with the School of Design and Creative Arts, the journal has established itself as one of the leading International journals that focus on drawing. TRACEY takes an inclusive approach to drawing, supporting a broad definition and embracing the weaving of drawing practice through the broader domain of visualisation. The journal is currently edited by Dr Deborah Harty and Prof Russell Marshall.</p>Loughborough Universityen-USTRACEY - Drawing and Visualisation Research1742-3570Drawing Anthropocene: Editorial
https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php/TRACEY/article/view/398
<p>This edition of TRACEY examines connections between drawing and the concept of Anthropocene. </p> <p>The term Anthropocene, coined at the start of the new millennium by geochemist Paul Crutzen and freshwater researcher Eugene Stoermer, denotes a new period of geological time, reflecting the extent to which human activity is making its mark on geologic stratigraphy. While there remains debate about the precise starting point of the Anthropocene, the concept is now widespread and in common usage as a byword for human impact on the environment. For the humanities and social sciences and arts, the term has a useful flexibility, used to bring together thinking about the ways in which traces of human presence impact upon the earth. </p> <p>The motivation for this special edition of TRACEY was twofold. Firstly, there has been an explosion of literature from many different fields accounting for developments in relation to Anthropocene thinking. It is high time to acknowledge and bring together a selection of the many rich and varied research applications of drawing encompassed under this term. Secondly, we have a sense that at its core, drawing is intimately connected to the concept of Anthropocene. Put simply, reduced to is basics Anthropocene is about trace, of action and its imprint. We might say the same about drawing. As such, Drawing Anthropocene is a particularly timely addition to the growing body of drawing research that looks beyond the borders of drawing to other disciplines and issues in the world. </p>Sarah CaseyGerry Davies
Copyright (c) 2024 Sarah Casey, Gerry Davies
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2024-03-112024-03-11171What's the Matter?
https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php/TRACEY/article/view/390
<p>In this paper I consider the idea of an expanded drawing practice, in which marks made on paper and marks made through excavation in a landscape may both be considered forms of drawing. Site-visits to open-pit mining areas act as research locations for exploring a vocabulary of mark-making that links the drawings made in the studio with the marks made in the landscape through excavation. These excavation sites are locations where vastly different time frames are conflated: ancient geological time, the speeding up of economic time and the deceleration allowed by artistic time; and finally the panic time associated with an age of ecological crisis. The temporal dissonance of these sites may lead to a sense of landscape instability, a characteristic of this current era in which, according to Timothy Morton, a human-centered viewpoint is being disrupted due to the effects of climate change. In my drawing practice, I am attempting to envision mark-making no longer as an individual mark made on a surface, (a dominant mark acting on an “empty” landscape) but rather as a form of ecological co-creation, in which both surface and mark are completely interdependent, and in which a conscious deceleration may act as a counterweight to accelerated economic imperatives.</p>Rachel Bacon
Copyright (c) 2024 Rachel Bacon
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2024-03-112024-03-11171114The Artfulness of More-Than-Human Trace
https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php/TRACEY/article/view/391
<p>This article grows out of a wider research project that investigates the artfulness of traces made by more-than-human life through the lens of ecologically inspired contemporary drawing practice. In this sense, drawing is a way of paying attention to the artfulness of an action, experience or state that leaves a trace: a mark or sign, track or trail left by the movement of life. This research concerns Indexical Drawing, a practice that makes direct contact with the world through mark-making, shifting the focus of drawing beyond the human. In this article, more-than-human traces are documented by photography resulting from a thrown-togetherness of lives through a practice of walking, paying attention and sympathy, forming new kinds of relationships with life such as gastropods, arachnids, insects and vegetation. Walking-in-place develops an investigative space for more-than-human objects to reveal their own aesthetic yield from the properties and physicalities they possess. This article challenges the anthropocentrism of the Anthropocene and aims to contribute to a rethinking and reimagining of ecological processes through a way of drawing, proposing and perceiving artfulness in the more-than-human.</p>Lucia Cunningham
Copyright (c) 2024 Lucia Cunningham
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2024-03-112024-03-11171113Drawing/Climate
https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php/TRACEY/article/view/392
<p>Climatic chaos has been the rule in the planet’s material unfolding, not the exception. The concept of Anthropocene is underpinned by theories of growth and development. Climatic chaos adds greater weight to its environing: burdening, persevering, or what may be called undergoing. This article argues that such an undergoing is a contingent and transformational modality of learning where drawing is understood as a medium of experience, rather than as conventional object experienced in relation. It can therefore leverage a sense of learning into. The approach to drawing in this essay explores an attentional modality of drawing that can offer a process of learning through self-inquiry, which I name flow drawing. This practice is situated within the context of a sandy low-lying isthmus known as The Neck, a geomorphology that connects the two landmasses of lunawuni / Bruny Island in Tasmania, Australia. The work is performed in a dynamic-dialectical mode that addresses the understandings of climate, identity, and the ontological foundations of drawing practice. In doing so, it attempts to raise existential questions and offers practiced paths to follow, rework, and extend.</p>Matt Gunn
Copyright (c) 2024 Matt Gunn
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2024-03-112024-03-11171116Enfolding the Garden
https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php/TRACEY/article/view/393
<p>With the desire to encourage new perspectives on temporality sympathetic to the indeterminate character of the Anthropocene, this article considers the role of drawing as a method for engaging with this contemporary condition in a critically reflective way. Modes of thinking about time as homogenous, linear, and measurable limit the possibility of the architecture drawing (and thus architecture itself) to posit futures that resonate more sensitively with the uncertain nature of the present. In discussing my own drawing process, framed by the temporal and spatial disturbances at the heart of its development, I invite an inquiry into drawing as a transformative practice relevant to the nature of our changing world.</p>Samantha Lynch
Copyright (c) 2024 Samantha Lynch
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2024-03-112024-03-11171113Drawings are Complicit
https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php/TRACEY/article/view/394
<p>In Australia it is well understood that landscape drawings, such as surveys and maps have contributed to ecological and cultural disaster on a vast scale. The drawing up of maps, particularly at the height of the continent's colonisation in the eighteenth and nineteenth century resulted in the genocide and relocation First Nations people and the destruction of much of their culture. In addition to this, maps and survey paved the way for drastic transformations of fragile landscapes: for example, from productive riparian zones to farmland and now dustbowls. What is less well-explored, however, is the way the practice of making drawing also resulted in violent transformations to the Australian landscape. To understand this, this paper examines several types of landscape drawings, including maps, surveys, landscape sketches and sections, and geological drawings, from the southern state of Victoria and its capital Melbourne and produced just prior to and in the early years of colonisation. It argues that in order to produce such drawings, artists and surveyors had to exert control over the landscape, sacrificially damaging it for the sake of the drawing. This paper uses a close reading of archival texts as well and historic drawings to argue for an alternate view of colonial drawing, often seen as a passive or heavily observational task.</p>Virginia Mannering
Copyright (c) 2024 Virginia Mannering
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2024-03-112024-03-11171Morecambe Bay Timescapes
https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php/TRACEY/article/view/395
<p>This article considers the role of drawing and creative processes of visualizing possible coastal futures as a means for engaging young people in climate change research and coastal management processes.<br>While predictive models show the impact of climate change in coastal areas around the globe, what will happen to individual places will largely depend on local strategies and interventions. Yet, the complexity of these phenomena as well as the high level of specialisms involved often tends to leave local communities, and young people in particular, unable to participate decision-making processes which will determine the future of the places where they live. <br>In the Morecambe Bay Timescapes project, three secondary schools and one college across Morecambe Bay were involved in a programme of activities which combined fieldwork, archival research, climate modelling, and art practice which led to the design of visions of hyperlocal coastal futures. These visions were used as part of an interactive exhibition that brought together young people and experts in conversations about possible futures. This article describes the role that drawing played in enabling such conversations, by providing a way for students to work through multiple layers of complexity and articulate their reflections.</p>Serena PollastriJoseph EarlLiz EdwardsSuzana Ilic
Copyright (c) 2024 Serena Pollastri, Joseph Earl, Liz Edwards, Suzana Ilic
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2024-03-112024-03-11171117Frozen Futures
https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php/TRACEY/article/view/396
<p>This article uses the context of glacial archaeology as a provocation to drawing. It repurposes Julie Cruikshank’s question ‘Are glaciers good to think with?’ (Cruikshank, 2012) to ask: is glacial archaeology good to think about drawing? It asks what the material intelligence of drawing might offer for articulating precarious balance of absence and presence engendered by the global climate emergency? Conversely, how might thinking through this lens enrich understanding of values of preservation in drawing in the context of the Anthropocene? These questions are approached through a case study of Emergency a drawing research project developed around archaeology studied at Sion History Museum, Switzerland. The research responds to calls to engage methodologies of the arts (Carey et al. 2016) ‘to encompass the moral, spiritual, aesthetic and affective’ dimensions of climate change (Castree et al. 2014). The article begins with the rationale for the research drawing, followed by a summary of the Emergency project, ending with reflection upon the outcomes and wider implications and opportunities for drawing research.</p>Sarah Casey
Copyright (c) 2024 Sarah Casey
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2024-03-112024-03-11171114Chthulucene Hekateris
https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php/TRACEY/article/view/397
<p>Responding to extremes of nature, droughts, forest fires and floods, “Chthulucene Hekateris” (Gould C. 2022) uses an expanded approach to drawing, to envision future hybrid humans, through evolutionary change, resulting from environmental impacts on the Earth in the distant future. The continued striving for technological “advance” has led to mutations in DNA to facilitate living on a damaged planet. Here I look beyond the Anthropocene to the Chthulucene, a term introduced by Donna Haraway to depict a third epoch where species live and die together responsibly, through perilous ecological times. I will delve into the past to speculate on the future, presenting examples of artists and designers who have used expanded drawing approaches, materially and digitally to make sense of the world so that we can see ourselves more clearly, to speculate in order to foresee a new future. Through my practice-based research I create a space where hybrid creatures meet with the audience so that we can imagine future inhabitants of the Earth and join the “Chthulucene Hekateris” (Gould C. 2022) as a manifestation of a future reality. Drawing is used to imagine a world using dance as a way of bringing the two worlds together to create a performative environment with mixed media, drawing and video installation. This artwork uses dance as a motif to imagine the future beings that will inhabit the Earth, posing questions to prompt action, inviting the audience to be part of the change.</p>Charlotte Gould
Copyright (c) 2024 Charlotte Gould
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2024-03-112024-03-11171113