When Drawing Speaks: The Dialogic Traces of a Continuous Line

This article focusses on Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible (Fossey, 2021), a video artwork that features in the exhibition Drawn to Time. Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible was made as attempt to create a continuous line drawing using video. The aim of my analysis in this article is to explore how Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible can be read as dialogic, and how the ‘complex interplay of cognitive, somatic, and material conventions’ (Lovatt, 10: 2021) that I claim converge in this drawing can provide insights into the dialogic dynamics of this artwork and drawing more broadly. Drawing, claims art Historian Anna Lovatt, ‘is fundamentally relational and deceptively complex’ (ibid), and it is a complexity and fundamental relationality that I seek to explore through my analysis of this drawing in relation to those of other artists, including Cy Twombly, Richard Long and Lygia Clark. Theorist Roland Barthes’ writing on Twombly supports an exploration how bodies, surfaces and marks interact to create drawings, and art historian Cornelia Butler’s discussion of how ‘idea-space’, as realised by Clark, is used alongside Barthes’ formulations. In essence, this article seeks to convey a sense of moving inside and outside drawing in a dialogic process that entangles intentions, marks, mediums, and reflective analysis.