Drawing Without Representation

Laura Donkers employs the performative nature of intra-actions to make her work. Using tissue thin skins of paper to re-tell a narrative using touch that inscribe marks onto a surface page, enfolding matter and meaning. As an interdisciplinary artist, she conducts place-based research to read and respond to the environment with a text of nature writing and sympoesis. She employs frottage as a kind of mirroring of the hand and the object, in which there is a separation and revealing of subject and object over time. The notion of text is embedded in marks that favour biosemiotics over words. A slow method of understanding landscape, place and environment emerges that intersects with environmental attitudes, activism and policy. An attempt at Posthuman is instead a collaboration of makers, human and non-human, that brings poetic insights on nature, culture and ethics. This paper will bring insight into her process from her intra-actions with trees found at Department of Conservation Reserves across New Zealand.