My visual art practice is multi-disciplinary and process-led. Recent work has been informed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘flesh’, which he describes as ‘surrounding and permeating space, body and experience’. This describes the audible world which connects and informs us, however, audible information also invades and interferes. In emphasising bodily perception of this invisible interference through drawing, my work challenges traditional ideas of sound and its visual representation. The body of work presented here, referred to as ‘Body Echoes’, shows a surrounding series of embodied and gestural mixed media drawings on paper. In my degree show, accompanying audio captured the sounds made during the drawing process, propagating, permeating the viewer through the Bluetooth headphones while communicating a translation of this interference. The audible world is constantly revealing and concealing complex layers of relations in time and space. In a culture driven by data and machine intelligence, my practice explores the potential for knowledge and meaning in the unobserved sensory information through embodied drawing. To represent this, I use the paper surface as a state of potential transformation as like the body, it responds and remembers. Through adopting the characteristics of everyday sounds as they are experienced, work emerges from the unknown echoing the invisibility of the audible. Allowing fluid orientation, marks are deposited, responded to and changed, this expressing the bodily experience of interference, temporality and asymmetry. In a manner similar to sound which unfolds in time and space, visual conversations between layers narrate how this sensory information is not only lost but also revealed. While intelligence is sought in machines, my work considers a repositioning of body thinking both personally and socially.
