Inhabiting Drawing

This paper examines embodied and performative drawing practices within the disciplines of art, architecture and, more broadly, spatial practice. In particular, the notion of the inhabitation of drawing will be discussed through an examination of two projects: ‘In-place and in-time’, the outcomes of a series of postgraduate seminars examining time and representation; and ‘Drawing the room Drawing within the room’, the presenter’s ongoing collaborative design research project. ‘In-place and in-time’ records phenomena, whilst the drawers are in their presence, through a designed temporal framework. This asks the drawer to both observe and record the world as dynamic, requiring active receptivity. Rather than the drawn outcomes of this observation recording a past time, the notion of experiential time – and an expanded present – is embedded in the act of drawing. These process of observation and performative drawing alludes to Edmund Husserl’s expression of a ‘thickened present’ (Kern, 1983, 83). ‘Drawing the room | Drawing within the room’ couples projective drawings with or creative post- occupancy data of built houses. Using motion capture technology, the movements of inhabitation are captured and translated to line work animations. The resulting drawings are projected full scale, exhibited in the space of the architectural office, the site of conceiving and production of both drawings and architecture. Both these projects highlight drawing’s temporality and the ways in which bodies and drawings intersect. The ramifications for the role of drawing in both pedagogy and research practices will be discussed through this lens of the inhabitation of drawing.