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Articles

Vol. 15 No. 1 (2121): Drawing Matters

All the Thoughts I Ever Had or Sitting With Uncertainty

Submitted
24 May 2021
Published
24-05-2021

Abstract

This paper is a reflective document that reviews a presentation/performance titled All The Thoughts I Ever Had, given at the Drawing Matters Symposium by noting its methods, acts, and frameworks. The term ‘presentation/performance’ fuses conventional academic research presentations, highlighting the performativity of the process. The presentation/performance used drawings, writings, and drawing/writings from ‘The magnified glass of liberation: A review of fictional drawings’ published in Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice (2018). This article uses an inactive creative period to consider drawing as a type of fiction. It chronicled the preparation of fictional drawings for a Fictional Museum of Drawing created by Phil Sawdon. Reworking this site of fictional drawing, the research advocated drawings’ fictions as rooted in foresight where predisposed thinking is navigated and anticipation reigns. This work placed certain recognitions of fiction by considering the material illusions of thought and, importantly for Drawing Matters, the materiality of the text was revisited and performed to disrupt certainty, favouring a presentation of a corporal subject as well as negotiating a process of understanding that played out ‘failures’ rather than resolves. The title all the thoughts I ever had was a way to introduce the performance/presentation as absurd and inherently situated to ‘fail’. This desire to confront failure emerged through the repeated experience of miscarriage. This paper is followed by a selection of the drawings and writings that I went on to make after the Drawing Matters presentation/performance, which became a publication called Sitting with Uncertainty (2019).