Open Collections

Still, they are speaking

University of British Columbia

Still, they are speaking is an exhibition and accompanying written paper, that uses expanded drawing practices developed in and with post-fire landscapes of the Okanagan valley to explore the role of drawing in enabling somatic engagement with land and the non-human. My thesis evolved from an initial enquiry into how a move from Ireland to this new environment would impact my drawing practice. A methodology of regular walking on the outskirts of Kelowna, in the region of the 2003 Okanagan mountain fire, established a somatic relationship with specific place. Creative research taking place in the field led me to explore the different forms of knowledge we encounter through physical presence in the land, and to consider ways in which drawing can bridge the gap between human and non-human knowledges. The clear physical traces of the movement of fire through this land, particularly evident in the bark of trees, culminated in approaches to site-specific mark-making that actively engaged with surface, and led me to consider drawing as wake, a trace of past movement, a story left behind. Equating physical marks in land as forms of knowledge brought me to an exploration of written language as a mark making practice informed by the natural world, a theme that is explored by the writing of David Abrams and Tim Ingold. With wildfire an ongoing environmental issue within the Okanagan specifically and British Columbia as a whole, I have used my drawing practice as a tool to bring the physical marks of wildfire still written in the land into the cultural, conversational space of the gallery. In this exhibition drawing becomes a process through which human understanding can engage in productive communication with the physical language of the land. Through a combination of field and studio work initial drawing experiments developed into large-scale installations occupying a physical presence in the gallery that allows mark and surface to speak.

Text

2020-06-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/74628

Visual Arts

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/