DRAWING FORTH
Drawing can be conceived as an activity that is drawn, following attentively as an echo of that which it attempts to describe. However, there is another form of drawing that emerges in the absence of any antecedent stimulus or provocation. Here, drawing does not follow but is initiated instead in the hope of making manifest that which could not have been conceived at the outset nor planned for in advance. In doing and being so, this drawing draws rather than is drawn. It no longer draws on — by making a demand on —the observable world nor on the powers of the imaginary, but simply attempts to draw forth, make appear. Withdrawing from the pressures of representing something else, drawing contemplates the terms of its own coming into being, performed as the reflexive loop of drawing drawing drawing. Unconcerned with giving material representation to what has been already conceptualised or is known to exist, the (oblique) aim of such a practice is one of producing the germinal conditions wherein something else might arise. It sets something up for something else to happen. This is not to conceive of drawing as a preliminary or preparatory sketch, but rather as the very site wherein something unknown or unplanned for might occur. Each line is performed as an unlearning, an unknowing, an unmeaning. Ritual reversal of habitual ways of thinking through the gesture of (making a) clearing. Drawing’s clearing does not produce clarity, but rather creates an opening for another kind of thinking and knowing, without prescribing what might emerge therein.
From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)