From Space to Place, from whole to the part


I talk about the experience of arrival at a form from what started as a process of observing and naming the content of observation. I would like to expand upon this experience in the context of arriving at a place from space, as opposed to locating a place and its content as aspects of study. 


My practice of drawing, took me exactly to areas of explorations where one ended up experiencing a part to whole relationship of self, with the part to whole relationship of space. The content, the place, were arrived at by understanding these relationships through observation.


Space is an abstraction while place is specific, informational, contextual and bound by meanings. The intellectual mind wants to know the meaning of everything whereas the spatial experience offers an opportunity to burrow under the meaning of those words towards experience of the meaning. This requires the movement and participation of every part and layer of the body of an observer. The whole process of seeing in space is like a play of puzzles where one looks at the whole in pieces to put together the whole picture. The understanding of space through the drawing is similar. There is a real space around an individual that comes with material, experience, and time and  a sense of flux.  The space on the paper is elusive as the nature of it depends on what mark one makes on it. The image appears at the moment of separation between the space and the mark. The fascinating part of my enquiry about observation through drawing is that the entire sense-making takes place because of this elusive space, in a fleeting moment in time. This moment is  always under a danger of becoming a representation if  done too early or done too late.