Joe Graham: Thinking Through Outline

A Research Collaboration with Loughborough University

This project aims to test a particular method of drawing that constitutes a practical element within my current drawing research methodology. The area my enquiry is focused on is questioning the extent to which a process of drawing can be understood to ‘capture’ the flow of phenomenal consciousness, understood in both an experiential and a phenomenological sense. In particular I am asking how drawing might work towards portraying what I consider to be the fundamentally ‘unified’ nature of conscious experience – an understanding summed up through the phrase “the stream of consciousness”. By questioning the link between consciousness and drawing, I am questioning the broader claim, put forward in various disciplines, that drawing can be said to ‘capture’ thinking.

The 3-month residency at C4RD is to develop series of drawings that aim to question this proposition via repeated serial drawing exercises that focus on the notion of ‘outline’ as a vehicle to discuss what might be ‘captured’ through a particular method of line drawing. It is my aim that by allowing the drawing process to expand into a phenomenological discussion of the nature of conscious experience, the process as it unfolds might point towards understanding how drawing, as a method for research, allows us to examine the role that subjectivity, understood here as ‘consciousness’, plays in constituting the objective world. This relates to my understanding of drawing as ultimately a practice of seeing, one that provides the practitioner with a means to engage with the practical sense of phenomenology’s conception of ‘objectivity-for-subjectivity’.

Joe Graham - Flea, with essays by Dominic Rich and Tom Morton is available as part of our Documents for Recent Drawing series. See our publications page for details.

Please join us to view the results of this research residency on exhibition 30 May - 15 June 2013, or at the reception 6-8pm 29 May 2013. C4RD is open Thursday - Saturday from 1 - 6pm at 2 - 4 Highbury Station Road, Highbury Islington, London N1 1SB. C4RD is a Registered UK Charity 1123530, and would particularly like to acknowledge the support of ARTUPDATE.COM/ and our anonymous supporters.

Centre for Recent Drawing

2-4 Highbury Station Rd LONDON N1 1SB

+44 2032396936  Charity No.1123530  Thu- Sat 1-6pm

Centre for Recent Drawing

2-4 Highbury Station Rd LONDON N1 1SB

+44 2032396936 Charity No.1123530 Thu-Sat 1-6pm

Joe Graham:

Thinking Through Outline

March - May 2013 C4RD Research Residency

Exhibition 30 May - 15 June 2013

reception 29 May 6-8pm

Research collaboration with Loughborough University