Affective Drawing: enquiring into Place and a place

Rebecca Disney

“This is a room that matters, but that she was never quite part of.”^[01]

“I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical following its traces whenever they appear on the surface.”^[02]

When you sit in a room and read a book you are not looking at your environment, you perceive it, hear it, feel it; you sense its atmosphere and presence. Inadvertently you register the space that surrounds you. The representation of this intangible or unquantifiable quality is the aim and action of drawing: to engender a series of precarious encounters with things hidden, at the edge of perception.^[03]

Drawing is a process of working with various ‘instruments’; found objects, film, and writing with,^[04] to manifest the immanent thoughts and feelings that, as Lilian Chee recognises, “persistently haunt, or transmit.”^[05] The works and workings presented here are concerned with exploring the sense of inbetweeness, of the dialogue – or, as Tim Ingold describes it, “correspondence”– which exists, unspoken or unseen between building and occupant.^[06]

Intuition, unknowing and affect are at the core of this inquiry, exploring the importance of a tacit, situational and embodied “wisdom” as outlined by Juhani Pallasma, in which representation is “not solely a matter of recording the visual essence of the scene.”^[07] It is a practice which examines what Mark Paterson defines as a “felt” phenomenology,^[08] an affective and metaphorical form of touch, or what has been defined in the humanities as a “different kind of intelligence.”^[09] Materials and haptic processes act as generators of thought, reliant upon and asserting that architects are “not so much uncertain experts, as experts in uncertainty.”^[10]
 
The object of this enquiry is a 300-year-old dilapidated workshop, re-appropriated into a live-work space. its body a palimpsest of exposed, worn surfaces, its skin made up of peeling layers of paint and oil stains, its skeleton in need of repair. 



01. Affective Reasoning drawing, the workshop building in its original state.

Thin pieces of window glass, treasured spolia, carefully removed and meticulously retained from the first floor of the building, rotting timbers, smudged mastic, dust, mould and associated miasmas. Found objects and sensations initiate a series of early drawings. Driven by these objects drawing is, as Michael Taussig observes, “a depicting,” and concurrently “a hauling, an unravelling and being impelled towards something.”^[11]

The materiality of the found objects establishes a subtle contingency, inflected by echoes of their previous use and uses; scores made by lost hands, chips and errant cutouts blurring edges which were once clearly defined, putty overlaid with stained white mastic revealing ongoing maintenance or repair, scratches and distortions the archive of use. The residual marks borne by these objects are active participants in the drawing, inherently fragile but reverberating with utterances which fuel our perception of a place, opening both us and that place “to new possibilities of being,” prompting us “not to seek closure.”^[12] They instil and install themselves in the drawer and drawing; drawing becomes an embodied process in which the observer and the thing observed are inextricably bound.

The drawings emerge from this process, formed of white and black paint, dark charcoal, fire grate polish, copper, lead sheet, sealant and casting silicone, all materials redolent within this space. These studies evoke textures of past occupancies, rhythms of actions which allude to absences. As though seen through clouded corneas, the drawings on glass become ludic assemblages constructed from traces, imagined actions and simple texts, etched across and through their surface. Letters drafted, but with no intention that they be sent,^[13] voices written into the drawings. It is through these scripts, “through writing, as well as speaking” following Jane Rendell, “that thinking takes place.”^[14] Written at various times, these writing-thinkings impart a melancholic quality to the glass-as-lens which is critical to the construction of the drawing. They impart a stillness, implying hidden meanings over time.

Part narrator, part lens, the glass substrates reveal fragments of the interior not usually seen, allowing us to re-witness the space: a paintbrush carelessly cleaned on the interior cladding, the leaching of rusty nails, their stains imprinted on the underside of beams suggesting water now absent, the minutiae of bitumen above empty sockets tracing the line where a flat roof had once been.

brittle lantern
keep out the rain,the cold,
but let in the light,
large windows
the workman’s mantle.

02. Affective Reasoning drawing, from the building in its original state, exploring the volume; Old panes of glass removed from the original building, retained for later use; As we cleaned other walls we uncovered handwritten notes on the plaster layers.

Serendipitously, when lifted from their background in the drawing process these delicate panes reveal a fleeting projection, ephemeral images appear and disappear. At times, mirror-like through the application of black paint, reflections reveal distortions in the rafters above me. Beneath where I sit, the wooden floor is bone dry, it bears no wax, stain or varnish, its original sawn surface remains. Deep in the crevices between the boards reside unearthed stories caught in wood and cloth fibres. When did this debris last see daylight? Silicon casts of the floor, soft and pliable, extract these traces and, like a forensic examination of a skin, chart the scars, nicks, grazes, and bruises inscribed over time.

These transitory projections begin to imply a sense of time and motion. Drawing becomes animating. I pursue. Using simple tools – a digital scanner and iPhone – to separate hand from eye I set out to capture the “happenstantial quality” of these unintentional drawings.^[15] In The Tactile Eye, Jennifer Barker establishes an embodied relationship between the medium of film and viewer, a “conduit of sorts…emerging in the intimate, tactile encounter between them.”^[16] A film of the workshop develops. I lack the craft and experience to handle the implements professionally, to navigate with the dexterity of a filmmaker, to move as deftly; rather, the act of filming reveals the infant within. I become childlike in their presence, playful, exploratory, prepared to step into aberrant adventures.  

It is given.

It is to be followed.

whose hand made the stencil, the maker

knew others will follow.

The stencil is wood,

wafer thin,

a pin holds it up on the timber wall

wood on wood

and so, the timber boards up on timber studs.

The wall shows the past, stencil, paint, nails, screws.

Where hands from former makers leave

their traces, we go to.

The collection of found object drawings has consolidated my understanding of Paterson’s premise that “touch can cement an empathic or affective bond, opening an entirely new channel of communication,”^[28] and provide a means of detecting ineffable qualities, or the sensed dialogue between built space and inhabitant. The nascent films, whilst still embryonic, expose a fissure in space and time, and foreground “a form of empathy with the building.”^[29] A new stratum overlays the building’s history, unveiling new latencies, tinctured “hollows and harbours in landscapes that shelter overlooked content and unforeseen possibilities.”^[30] The workshop continues to infiltrate my thoughts; intimate and subjective; it is an “oneiric house.”^[31] Paraphrasing Pallasmaa, over time I have set myself in that space and the space continues to settle in me.^[32] It is through acts of drawing that we communicate.


Published 10th November, 2025.