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A symptomatology of touch: provisional categories of drawing and ceramic sculpture across the technical drawing exhibition at the IST Museum de Civil, University of Lisbon


Helena Elias, Vicarte - Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon
Ana Tomé, CERIS - Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon

 

 

This communication addresses the work developed during the artistic research residency What is in a line? as part of the exhibition venue “Technical drawing in Técnico (IST-UL)”, held at the Civil Museum, one of the University of Lisbon Museums. The residence was part of a post-doctoral project that aimed to propose conditions of possibility of art creation to occur, namely within an institutional knowledge space. The works produced departed from drawing and ceramics as provisional categories calling into action sensorial knowledge and offering a dialogic interpellation across the exhibition space and their displays.


Hummel’s engraving about the tale of Dibutades, told by Pliny, the elderly, was the trigger to address drawing and ceramics as provisional categories to create artworks. The engraving depicts both activities of drawing and ceramics, namely the conjunction of the casting a human shadow onto the wall (projection), the contour drawing of the projection, and the potter shaping the vase. The tale stands for the creation of drawing but also sculpture, as the potter used the image contour method to build the first clay bust hanged on the top of the Corinthians roofs. Additionally, the role of touch was visible in the engraving, disrupting the historical production of artworks reporting the tale as the creation of drawing or painting. For so, the artistic research proposed to blur artistic dichotomies departing from line and shadow features to iterate and generate something else. “Drawing” and “ceramic sculpture” were then performed as provisional/unstable nominations to create works. For instances, a body of clay could become an instrument to draw as materials would not stand for established disciplines and their methods.


The exhibition “Technical drawing at Técnico 1911-2018” displayed the collection of 880 drawings from the museum's collection, covering different scientific areas, dating back to the Institute's beginnings. Representation techniques ranged from the use of graphite on foolscap paper, Indian ink on tracing paper, blueprints, and even delicate white chalk drawings on dark-toned cardboards. Also, didactic models were shown in the exhibition: valves, ball joints and other mechanical devices – developed for past workshops as well as other didactic scale models (in wood, ceramic) of structures (such as roof trusses and Pombaline cages), pipes, parts of buildings and bridges. Drawing is a foundational discipline at IST on par with mathematics, physics, and chemistry, a vehicle through which future engineers communicated project ideas to the carpentry/locksmith workshops. This matrix is still very present today, with the presence of “geometric modeling”. The exhibition presented a diachronic reading of its evolution and different assimilations in curricular programs, as computer technologies and of computer graphics.


Helena´s works adopted the material language of these historical drawings, devices objects, and interpellated their visual rationality through curious displays while rendering visible haptic experiences. Drawing was understood as autonomous, subsidiary or simultaneously both, while interacting with the contents of the exhibition. The experimentation took on board the material-discursive contexts of the technical drawing or didactic objects of the museum already described. Such play resulted in the creation of specific artworks as artists books (hand sized and freehand), several ceramic sculptures, photos, and blueprints, thus questioning the rationality, rigorous and objectivity of technical drawing, and the presence, yet invisible, of the hand and touch, indexed to the line pressure of the technical drawings, the handmade models exhibited.


Parallel activities at IST museum included workshops, led by Helena Elias, were aimed at two different groups: 1) “The perimeter of things” was aimed at children at the IST daycare center; and 2) “free hand” was aimed at students of the integrated master's degree in architecture and included in the Descriptive Geometry teaching activities. Workshops with clay such as the Perimeter of things, followed a speculative approach to technical drawing exercises written in the “Free hand” artist book, and were also promoted as a knowledge transfer event to students of Engineer and Architecture as well to younger participants of the IST kindergarten.


The works have produced a dialogical interpellation across the exhibition space and their displays. The residency unpacked the entanglements of the binary relation of free drawing and technical drawing, thus constituting an excess, regarding what was the previous post-doctoral artistic practice and the displayed objects of the museum exhibitio

 

Keywords: drawing, ceramic sculpture, free hand and technical drawing, technical drawing exhibition, University of Lisbon Civil Museum


Biography
Helena Elias is a fulltime assistant professor in Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, and a VICARTE artistic research member. She was an FCT post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Sculpture department (DOI 10.54499/DL57/2016/CP1547/CT0001) with the project: The Dibutades event. She is currently involved in funded FCT national projects and Horizon Europe projects.

 

Ana Tomé, PhD in Architecture and Master in Construction from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). She is an assistant professor at the Department of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Environment, and member of the CERIS research center (FCT funding: UIBD/04625/2020). She was deputy director for Técnico Museum Management (2018-19). He took over the management of the Civil Engineering Museum (2017-18) and the ISTAR laboratory (2011-18). She is co-founder of IPTI.PT.