The long way round: drawing to know by ‘not knowing’

Abstract

While the reflexive and investigative potential of observational drawing is now acknowledged clearly within human geography, drawing practices are still most often brought to bear upon research subjects once they have been defined, rather than in helping to identify subjects for investigation. Reflecting upon the author’s own experience of artistic fieldworking, this article explores how expanded drawing can help researchers hold positions of ‘not knowing’ and maintain an openness to the possibilities that exist within a site during their earliest encounters with it. It is argued here that some forms of expanded drawing can foster ‘not knowing’ by offering access to information about the field beyond the visual, through direct and close physical engagement with it. By shifting emphasis towards sensory and embodied information, expanded drawing can generate fragmentary, partial and fugitive understandings which can unsettle assumptions about a place. Cultivating such positions of ‘not knowing’ can open up the field, break down pre-conceived object hierarchies and enable the site to ‘speak back’ and be heard more evenly. Expanded drawing also has the capacity to foster new relations between the researcher and their site as they persistently and intimately interrogate it. This is proposed as a form of ‘noticing-as-care’; a tentative artistic counter-strategy which may reveal unevenness in the attention paid across post-industrial landscapes undergoing regeneration, where areas of profound neglect and hyper-curation often sit close to each other.