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    Nests: Drawing As Morphological Imprint
    Katrinka Wilson

    This essay concerns the movements made in drawing. It describes research into the relationship between the somatic and creativity in drawing, and discusses how those ideas relate to the interaction between movements and perception in my current work, which involves making detailed drawings of nests using magnifying glasses to mediate between the drawing, the drawing object, the drawing act and the viewer. This work is also a response to a change in my own visual field (through acquired visual impairment) and because the practice is informing the theory, which here is still tentative, I have structured the paper to reflect this dialogical interaction, juxtaposing the theoretical discourse with a drawing narrative (identified in grey in the footnotes below). I first looked at the role of drawing movements during my doctoral research (Wilson, 2005). I considered that the movements we make whilst drawing formulate or chart the spatial relations of the image we are planning to draw before we commit to draw it, and I thought that these movements are mimetic and amount to a pre-drawing; a discrete rehearsal and action sequence with purposes critical to the overall drawing process. I found that the drawing act, if considered in a theatre paradigm, is a conduit for moving ‘being’ into ‘becoming’ (Wilson, 2005: 161).

    Nests: Drawing As Morphological Imprint

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    Biographical information

    Katrinka Wilson
    AA2A residency
    Derby University
    e-mail: katrinka@hotmail.co.uk

    Katrinka Wilson is an artist with a background in performance. She received her doctorate in 2005, an exploration into the way that artists move as they draw, relating this to the mimetic impulse and to the relationship between the drawn image and the drawing body. After her PhD Katrinka has continued her practise in various guises, including in the theatre and museum worlds. Most recently she have been investigating collaboration and the pursuit of wonder in a partnership called (h)edge kelektiv, as well as considering drawing, together with her semi blindness through the ‘Tumbleweed” project. This is a philosophical, optical, and perceptual journey. It involves, among other things, using magnification to create extremely detailed drawings of nests that she otherwise sees as organic forms without discernable features. These drawings emphasise the differences in what people perceive and are a kind of dysfunction that she really enjoys.

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