Black ink being blown around paper lying on wet sand flats is a transformative moment; one way to image a place: the image-repertoire in action. Horn uses the term ‘to place’, perhaps I am ‘placing’. Placing the paper to receive the affects of the ‘place’. Allowing the place to effect the surface of the paper through its placement. But I wonder if ‘placing’ sounds too fixed, suggesting the ‘placing’ is predetermined or planned. The environmental conditions are transcribing, locating a response onto the paper. My involvement is providing the circumstances for something to happen, then stepping back to let it take place.
Locating a response onto a piece of paper is not ‘capturing’ or ‘depicting’ a place because it is not attempting to document or record it. Rather the response gives evidence of an idea for the action, that the idea can have form. This is a significant shift in understanding the reason for a drawing to take place. The drawing records the will to act, to prove that an event took place. However, the influence of the place is pervasive in the sense that it precipitated the thinking to enact an idea. The environmental conditions and sensory appreciation of the place provide a reason to act, placing an idea.
Besides the environmental effects of their ‘placing’, the drawings should evoke an indeterminency of form and media. They are not representational in the pictorial sense, but they suggest imaginary forms, fragments like those found on the beach. The media hovers in a space that is blended and layered so as to suggest a three dimensional space akin to a sculptural object. The media blends with the paper to become indistinguishable, producing perplexity on the materials and media used.
I want the form and the media to mesh, to court the viewer with curiosity and sensual attraction, to give them a fragment of a sensory experience, a feeling of a placing they might touch, to be effected by an idea that was enacted in a particular time and place.
But I wonder if this is possible. The idea of this text may be more affective.