37drawings

Stephanie Davidson These drawings - digital collages - are glimpses into my life working at home with two kids during the pandemic. I’m in my first semester of a new teaching job, so I’m glued to the screen daily, trying to keep my 99 students on-track remotely. I teach drawing. Meantime, my kids wake up every day in the same mood as the birds outside - chirping, singing, flying around, not a worry in the world. The drawings are meant to convey the chaos and clash of moods in our personal worlds each day. They have an element of the absurd, which is true-to-life. All of the furniture elements come from Rhino files of actual projects that are on-hold due to the pandemic.

Mark Dorrian I like drawing in pencil because of its tentativeness – which I would describe as a fragile way of reaching out, of extending something with both uncertainty and tact. A sort of reaching out that seeks to touch – to encounter – itself, but in a way that carries a sense of the limits and contingency of the act and a readiness to draw back. A line drawn digitally is never like this, it is either there or it isn’t and so is both more and less certain. When it is there it is absolute, but at the same time it can be removed without a trace. This erasability means that there is less at stake in the drawing of the line, for things can always be reset and returned to the beginning. When the line is drawn on a material surface, which inevitably receives an imprint as well as a mark, this is never the case, and no doubt that’s one reason for the caution with which we have to proceed. And so, while architectural lines in pencil tend to described as singular marks, they are more often accumulations of line upon line – the initial faint path, which is not so much traced but trailed by the pencil, and then another that over-draws the first, making it more certain by both intensifying and inflecting it. And then often further more, which differentiate and dynamise parts of the line, giving them depth. This often gives me the impression that a drawing is seeping out of its paper surface rather than being inscribed upon it.

The drawing is an exploded perspective of our (Metis: Mark Dorrian + Adrian Hawker) project for a Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial, Lety, Czech Republic (competition project 2019). The drawing is 614mm (wide) x 665mm (high), pencil on yellow trace, scanned with digital photomontage elements. The location is a former concentration camp, and the concrete walkway at the bottom of the drawing passes over the archaeological site. The clouds indicate a reflecting pool and the red roofing element is a folded cor-ten steel structure. The little building at the top left of the drawing sits beside the area where those who died in the camp were buried. http://www.metis-architecture.com/projects/roma-and-sinti- holocaust-memorial/

Iván Hernández Quintela Since the pandemic, I have been drawing a postcard each day, on nothing in particular, just as an exercise in keeping busy, an exercise in exploring notions of space. They range from abstract geometric compositions to architectural projects I think about as I reflect on the notion of home in isolation times. Each drawing by itself is just another drawing. I think the value is in the series, in the sum of them all. Drawing as a diary. The drawings are traditional postcard size. I draw them on postcard-size white paper. I draft most of them. I then scan them. Somehow I think the scale to be essential. To draw on a 4 x 6 has something of a microcosmos. To lose oneself, for half an hour, in such small piece of paper. And to think of the drawing as a postcard, as an open letter, and for the drawing to be part of the text, to think by drawing. I will send the originals to the friends and family I could not see during the pandemic. About the drawings, I usually draw in sets of three, for three days I will draw something similar with small variations. Perhaps by a sense that I might improve from one drawing to the next but by the third attempt I feel I can move unto something else. Then I start another mini-series, a different approach, with a different technique, a different concept. So I guess I drift by blocks. I do feel that after a couple of dozen drawings one can see a preoccupation, or a sense of pattern. Piotr Lesniak Drawing 03 is part of a project titled Architecture of Loss by Dr Ella Chmielewska, in which I participate as a designer and researcher. Focusing on five sites in Warsaw, the project seeks to develop a methodological alternative to historical description, drawing on ‘moments of danger’ as flashpoints of learning (about oneself as much as about the Other) in Benjamin’s sense.

POSTCARDS - cuarentena. Series C 01,02,03. 4 x 6” each

The punctum of the collage — if I could ever isolate one — seems to emerge from the overlapping of the city’s photoplan and the oblique aerial photograph. Taken by Luftwaffe’s own reconnaissance aircraft in 1944, the photograph shows an extensive ‘morphology of ruination’ (E. Chmielewska), from spot damage to entire tenements reduced to rubble behind the diagonal lines of the Ghetto wall.

summer 2020

Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator