OPEN STUDIOS at DRAWinternational

What form could a stream of thoughts take?

During my residency, I have researched  the form of body, written and drawing language.

After almost two months of being immerse in my practice and its rhythms and movements, I had the opportunity to organise the work for the viewing of an open studio. This occasion was very beneficial to organise spatially some outcomes of my residency in the whole building of DRAWinternational.

The research has been a physical way of thinking-making, navigating and discovering. The work is performative and follows a thread and system of action, response, navigation with intentionally injecting a sense of play.

My aim for the open studio was for the audience to move between the different works, so that they could experience a physical journey through my research, got an immersion in the process expansion, and develop their own response and links. I felt that the physical journey and the movement between the rooms was integral to the exhibition. We cannot either underestimate the impact of exhibiting in the context of the space of creation.

While there was no specific “message” in the work, I could recognise some plastic themes, that become more apparent when I placed intentionally artworks in space in relationship to each other and the building.

Seeing things on a flat screen is very different from the physical experience, yet I will be sharing in the next blog posts the 5 different spaces that display some outcomes of my residency. (you might need to scroll back up to get a the documentation in the order of the physical exhibition).

Photograph Credit @Jade Decade

Residence at DRAWinternational IN Process

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.

Diving in ink and lanscape

Ink’s materiality is particular and mesmerising in its fludity, directness and honesty. And above all, ink has its own momentum that I cannot control, only accept and navigate, like water.

Here is further explorations and visual conversations with the landscape around the farm I am staying in.

Personal drawing documentation, winter 2024