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Drawing as another way of creatively working through a mourning process and finding new ways of addressing the spectator

Ans Nys, Luca School of Arts

The mourning subject suffers from inertia, often combined with reclusion, retreats into silence, thereby sometimes even losing the ability to language. Paradoxically, the mourner can feel the longing and urge to write to his lost love. The example of Monteverdi who, suffering from the loss of his wife composed the ‘lamento d’Arianna’ (1608) thereby creating a completely new musical genre is in this regard outstanding. Remaining an exceptional case, mourning leads mostly to a repetitive ‘melancholic’ lamentation using the same words or sentences, with little mobility or creative liberty, in the worst case resulting in mutism.

Working as an artist in the field of drawing my practice-based PhD investigates the potentiality of drawing to inaugurate a creative drawing process on the verge of writing with the aim of interrogating typical expressions of mourning, such as absence/void, (compulsive) repetition, memory, shadow, index, trace and gesture - themes that happen to be pivotal in understanding the medium of drawing itself.

My aim is to assemble, in this lecture, the fundamental philosophical, artistic, aesthetic, and - in a generic sense - creational aspects concerning my practice based artistic approach of the process of mourning, and to demonstrate the steps I think are required in order to both visualize the intermediary processes and trans-form mourning.

By looking at three historical cases of women drawing the loss of a loved one without intending to make art - Butades’ daughter from Pliny’s story, Breton’s Nadja/Léona Delcourt, and Emma Hauck - I discern in each of them a tracing, imprinting, or circumscribing an absence or void, resulting in drawings with a deictic character. Subsequently, the place of both the addressee and the viewer (who do not coïncide) is discussed in these cases. I’ll argue that their drawings - or writings that flip over into drawing - are able to address the viewer in another way than we are used to as ‘disinterested spectators’ (Kant) in the contemplation of art.

Furthermore, I’ll explain how precisely these acts and the addressing of the viewer occurred in the different stages of the making of some recently extended drawings followed by a presentation of the methods and strategies I developed. Two of them are cutting up drawings and staging them on different grounds in space. These methodes enabled to break into the compulsive repetition that is at stake in a mourning process and how these strategies extended the drawings into larger performative and in-situ works that address the viewer in a way that she/he plays an active role in the works. My argument is that an extended approach to drawing can be both effective in working through a mourning process as in the process of learning to draw.

Finally, I articulate some reflections on the concepts of metonymy and metaphor and their potential for comprehending the shared field of mourning, drawing and writing, relying on Lacanian and Derridian thinking.

Keywords: Extended drawing, mourning, spectator, art education, creative therapy