The Embodied Co-Creative Process of Drawing

In this paper, I describe the agency of my eco-social embeddedness, and how it has influenced my feelings of connection and in turn, motivated and informed my research. This has led to the articulation of my practice and identity as an environmental artist who works with community embodied knowledge. This involves a necessarily durational and emplaced experience that affords me time to consider how to progress the interpretive and participatory elements of my aesthetic practice. These co-creatively engage others in discourse and activity in eco-social sustainability matters that are beneficial to the community and also beneficial to the development of contemporary artistic practices.
Co-creation implies that both human and non-human participants are active in the unfolding process of creating and gathering evidence that reveals their interdependent knowledges. To understand this better, I employ the practise of frottage, using pastel or graphite in a rubbing motion on thin paper, laid against a surface. The paper conceals, and the medium reveals the texture of the surface beneath. The artist is implicated in this unfolding and entanglement of matter, and is active in the reaction of the pastel-on-paper-on-surface through making-yet-not-making the mark. This explicitly shifts the foreground/background qualities of each material constituent of the methodology. Through the specific intra-action of these objects, including my fingers holding the pastel and the paper, together with the gentle pressure I exert on them and hold within my taut body, the drawing emerges from, rather than leads (as in a visualisation) the intra-action that fashioned it.