Sharing the wind drawing process – Mount Caburn 9/10/17

This collaborative wind drawing was made as part of the Walking Mount Caburn walking workshop for Phoenix, Brighton, and was introduced with a quote from “A Field Guide to getting Lost’ by Rebecca Solnit.

‘For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that colour of horizons, or remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The colour of that distance is the colour of an emotion, the colour of solitude and of desire, the colour of there seen from here, the colour of where you are not. And the colour of where you can never go.’ (pg 29)

The participants were introduced to the idea of being playful and sensitive around relinquishing agency between pen and paper, and that the interface of the drawing can be experienced as both a surface and a point in time that the passing wind activates and traces can collect. We noted where the wind was coming from and how it might connect to Solnit’s thoughts on distance.

‘We tried a wind drawing for the first time. Together as a team. What felt stimulating was the notion of creating marks to the rhythm of a wonderful force of nature – the wind. I have reflected on this experience a number of times since that day and have found it almost too hard to grasp. I must experience this again’ Sarah Davies Phoenix, Brighton

Wind drawings, Witterings, August 2016. Photographs by Joanna Stevens

Wind drawing flag, Witterings, 22nd August 2016

At Witterings I was able to make a large wind drawing by attaching the paper to a drift stick and lashing it to a low wooden groin. This flag, in an 11.4 mph wind, allowed me to work on a larger scale using a pen in each hand – and to encounter the tide on its return.

Video footage by Tony Gammidge

Wind drawing with screen and mono print, Witterings, 22nd August 2016

Witterings quicktime

Stop frame animation of wind drawing, flag II, Witterings, 22nd August 2016

Wind drawing made in sight of Burgh Island, June 27th 2016.

Here I have introduced a ‘text ball’ to encounter the wind drawing process. The text balls present fragments of mono printed thought in the form of words that have been scratched into a surface and transferred. The paper is Onion Skin. It is semi translucent and moves easily in the wind. The wind drawing serves to work with the text ball, adding and subtracting to allow a complex network of lines to build upon the surface.  Black and white ink is used in the drawings and serve to both make apparent and to cover, or ‘erase’.

In the first moving image clip the shadow of the pen works in tandem with the drawing implement to reveal the point of contact with the paper, which in turn begins to make visible the space where the switch between Ingold’s ‘threads and traces’ happen. When the shadow and the tip of the pen come together contact is made and a trace occurs. I find this image exciting and want to develop this way of revealing and capturing this.

‘Two kinds of line did seem to stand out from the rest, and I called them threads and traces. Yet on closer inspection, threads and traces appeared not so much categorically different as transforms of one another. Threads have a way of turning into traces, and visa versa. Moreover, whenever threads turn into traces, surfaces are formed, and whenever traces turn into threads, they are dissolved.’ Ingold, T. (2007) Lines: A Brief History, Routledge