On an Account of Seeing and Not Seeing: Drawing as an Embodied Experience

Abstract

This research project takes drawing as the exemplar to investigate the correlation between vision and blindness, memory and remembering, and that which is determined by haptic and sensory perception. Drawing operates as the means and the medium to interrogate the subject of perception and ‘ocularcentrism’, a paradigm that has historically privileged sight as the dominant sense. As part of my studio research, I examined the work and methods of specific contemporary artists who forego sight (metaphoric and actual), giving preference to those investigations that reference the body as the site of perception. This initiated my research into Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological conception of the body as “reversible flesh”, which contextualises drawing as embodied experience. The studio practice, a significant component of the research project that focuses on the object as a mnemonic device, has led me to consider ideas of seeing through non-seeing. I have incorporated the act of drawing blind, a metaphoric blindness that both sees and does not see, as the means to reflectively consider memory as an attribute of perception and as a process of engaging the body as the site of perception. Throughout the exegesis, I interweave key writings by Hélène Cixous, who addresses the philosophical questions relating to perception, writing, and drawing through self-reflection in Stigmata: Escaping Text. This led me to question what is it that we see and cannot see, and is blindness at the heart of vision. These questions, in turn, address my enquiry into the subject of perception, of vision and blindness, and of memory.