Drawing as Practice: the Past as Potential

This document expresses a theoretical and practical description of my research and studio practice. I engage in mining and querying historical and political archives, specifically those documenting the North American Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s to early 1970s. Images and text are collected, then re-presented through the act of hand drawing, furthered by layering and assembling the resulting images to stimulate embedded strategies of resistance and subjectively understand the affect of those positions in the present. A direct interest in themes of potentiality, possibility and the ability to visually and physically express these notions frames my practice. In short, through this work I am asking what are the capabilities of revisiting historical images as sites for latent possibilities of collective engagement? Drawing returns these images to the present, and therefore asks the viewer to reconsider the hopes and failures of the past, the ideals and goals not-yet-realized. The ultimate installation strategies of this work: fragmented, rearranged, layered and reorganized simultaneously seek to crowd the viewer in multiple drawing events, eliciting the sentiment of the crowd, the mass, and re-emphasizing the individual. Ultimately my practice engages in multiple temporalities – past, present and future, through a careful and embodied practice of observation, deliberation, and generative translation.