Mary Yacoob: Draft Series
My starting strategy for the Draft drawings is similar to the strategies I've used in the past, I take as a starting point something that exists in the world outside of myself and discover how I can express my relation to it through my own visual language.
The Draft drawings took as their starting point diagrams I find in sound technology books. These are about the hardware behind sound rather than sound output. I then sketch from the diagram and stop looking at the textbook. I work on my sketch to decide on the form and choose a mark with which to develop it. Every drawing has it's own mark, such as a line of a particular width, a flick or a dot. The first outline on the paper is with chalk and this is then built up with the chosen mark.
What attracts me to diagrams is that they are visually arresting and yet to most of us they are mysterious. Life has reached such a level of complexity that we cannot understand the workings behind the everyday objects we use. The diagrams that generate the stuff of our daily lives are understood only by experts, a mindset that is remote and usually unknowable. Taking them out of their normal context and placing them in an artistic one serves to emphasise this.
Once you enlarge them and drive them through an artistic process diagrams become even more allusive. However, viewers can then commune with them directly, projecting their own interpretations and build their own relationship to the drawings. I like that the structure taken from the original source retains some of it's integrity in that the rhythm and repetition, form and improvisation of mark making can be said to hark back to the original source. And yet the thoughts people impose on the drawings widens their scope.
I always play with order and chance in my work. I invent rules and then allow chance to play it's role. In this way you end up with an image you would never have come up with on your own. This can be freeing and exciting but also means you've ceded control to some extent. Some of my works lean towards order and some lean towards chance. My main medium of choice is colour ink and the Rotring pen, which is a technical instrument. In the Draft drawings I've been using pens with thicker nibs, which means the line is less predictable because the ink flow stops and starts. This adds to the organic feel of the drawing and a sense of movement.
I use white ink on dark blue paper for the Draft drawings as I was thinking of blueprints - technical drawings used by engineers or architects to plan and reproduce their designs. In the past I've make Dieline or Diazotype prints which are an ammonia based process resulting in blue facsimiles. These copying machines are obsolete now and have been replaced by computer modeling and digital printers. Recently I've been making cyanotypes, a very early photographic process by which you can make one-to-one copies of drawings using a chemical process which results in white lines over a deep blue. I think recalling these long-gone processes creates an interesting bridge in time back to analogue processes. The presence of a maker, the evidence of time in the building of an image through gestural marks communicates it's own kind of relationship to the viewer.
The Draft drawings took as their starting point diagrams I find in sound technology books. These are about the hardware behind sound rather than sound output. I then sketch from the diagram and stop looking at the textbook. I work on my sketch to decide on the form and choose a mark with which to develop it. Every drawing has it's own mark, such as a line of a particular width, a flick or a dot. The first outline on the paper is with chalk and this is then built up with the chosen mark.
What attracts me to diagrams is that they are visually arresting and yet to most of us they are mysterious. Life has reached such a level of complexity that we cannot understand the workings behind the everyday objects we use. The diagrams that generate the stuff of our daily lives are understood only by experts, a mindset that is remote and usually unknowable. Taking them out of their normal context and placing them in an artistic one serves to emphasise this.
Once you enlarge them and drive them through an artistic process diagrams become even more allusive. However, viewers can then commune with them directly, projecting their own interpretations and build their own relationship to the drawings. I like that the structure taken from the original source retains some of it's integrity in that the rhythm and repetition, form and improvisation of mark making can be said to hark back to the original source. And yet the thoughts people impose on the drawings widens their scope.
I always play with order and chance in my work. I invent rules and then allow chance to play it's role. In this way you end up with an image you would never have come up with on your own. This can be freeing and exciting but also means you've ceded control to some extent. Some of my works lean towards order and some lean towards chance. My main medium of choice is colour ink and the Rotring pen, which is a technical instrument. In the Draft drawings I've been using pens with thicker nibs, which means the line is less predictable because the ink flow stops and starts. This adds to the organic feel of the drawing and a sense of movement.
I use white ink on dark blue paper for the Draft drawings as I was thinking of blueprints - technical drawings used by engineers or architects to plan and reproduce their designs. In the past I've make Dieline or Diazotype prints which are an ammonia based process resulting in blue facsimiles. These copying machines are obsolete now and have been replaced by computer modeling and digital printers. Recently I've been making cyanotypes, a very early photographic process by which you can make one-to-one copies of drawings using a chemical process which results in white lines over a deep blue. I think recalling these long-gone processes creates an interesting bridge in time back to analogue processes. The presence of a maker, the evidence of time in the building of an image through gestural marks communicates it's own kind of relationship to the viewer.