Synapse Festival | Artists

MARKING TIME
When Pamela M. Lee spoke of the ‘double time of drawing’ she was utilising a theory originally acknowledged by Henri Focillon.
“Focillon speaks generally of two kinds of time in the work of art: the temporality it projects in its internal development, and its temporality in relation to ‘other aspects of human activity’ - its externalisation in history.”

Growing out of a rather existentialist body of work investigating actual space and perceived space, an experiment - a simple pencil rubbing of a wall intended to question whether the origin of the mark resides in the artist or the wall - has led to the drawings presented in Marking Time. They hope to expand this temporality and create a further shift in focus to drawing as subject.

The work reveals evidence of a point in time where an interaction took place between the artist and the space, but also acknowledges the performative nature of the drawing which carries on speaking of its own liminal process, a further stretch of time.

That drawing is enjoying a current renaissance augments the temporal aspect running through this work. The repeated tally mark is a common testimony to time and space but also tackles a complex reckoning with representation, form, material, object and purpose. If this particular mark evokes the imprisonment of drawing, its subsequent freedom from this is through abstraction, performance and above all celebration of process.

From Henri Focillon, The life of Forms in Art, 1934, quoted in Some Kinds of Duration: The Temporality of Drawing as Process Art, Pamela M. Lee, essay from After Image, Drawing Through Process, Cornelia Butler Museum of Contemporary Art (1999).

Beth Heaney | info@beth-heaney.com | bethheaney.blogspot.com