There is something particular and intense in being by yourself, with your thoughts and your body, in a foreign vacant space: a sensation of emptiness, a whisper for action.
I aimed two years ago when I applied for the residency at DRAWinternational to research body, written and drawing language in a personal context of being back to my birth country I left almost 20 years ago: which means a language, a place, a way of relating to things, a system, a culture I left yet that is still part of me.
The time has been suspended since I arrived, flowing between French and English, between past memory, present actions and thoughts about the future. A mental and emotional confusion had to leave space for a search for physical connection with the place.
I started my residency following my interest in the dandelion flower: a memory of childwood and a poetry of ephemerality, time passing, cycles of things.
In parallel I have been exploring the act of writing as a way of “délier, dénouer les pensées”: untangling, unravelling thoughts.
What become at play in the work was putting behind the idea of “meaning” : opening a sense of possibilities, a desire for something else; the opening of desire.
I have researched in the making the idea of “dénouer”, “délier,” in different ways, following a thread of thoughts and a system of action, response, navigation.
The intention of untangling thoughts and liberating the work from meaning into the senses seems always in tension with “forming sense".
The key to let the work develop lies in injecting a sens of play.
Over the past weeks, different streams of works have developed. I am presenting them here in a linear manner. Yet the works permeates between each other and if anything, the development is rhizomatique.
You will find below, how the work is developing.
I started with recording movements external to me in the dandelion seeds, responding to external elements and movements, with different systems of mark-marking.
The drawing process also evolves with using left over residue of thinking and actions in the studio as physical guiding elements to respond to and travel through the paper, recording a physical “writing/marking” of the experience, “becoming water”.
-The work took a turn embodying actions as a way of thinking and drawing.
I also explore the activity of asemic writing in different ways, another language coming through the action not the meaning.
In paralell, the drawn line took the form of a long piece of paper. I have choregraphed the roll of paper and a chair.
Then I have re-engaged physically in the present of the drawn line on printed photography.
With the initial intention to bring to life the paper line into a physical line, a very physical/body quality came through the image. Initially pleasing, almost, Bacon’esque, the work was calling for something a bit more delicate, a type of erasure, a need for depth, another reading beyond something too evocative of the real.
The desire of erasure, act of erasure or overlaying with white on white, lead to a “non-reading’ more distant and poetic form. A danse between the mark and its erasure, like the paper and the chair.
I have explored the “scene” in drawn lines only, in total physicality: a search for simplicity, catching something memorised and lived. A type of activation and deletion. In process.
Finally I have moved through my seeds drawing, catching movements and lights with a camera, drawing/writing with the camera. A left over of marks, of movements in space, that brings lines into new ones.
Thanks for travelling with me through my project. To be continued.
All images @audeparichot personal documentation.