Microsoft Word - 10th Jan fictional Drawings.doc O'Donnell, Lucy (2018) The magnified glass of liberation: A review of fictional drawings. Drawing, research, theory, practice, 3 (1). pp. 47-62. Downloaded from: http://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/2940/ The version presented here may differ from the published version or version of record. If you intend to cite from the work you are advised to consult the publisher's version: https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp.3.1.47_1 Research at York St John (RaY) is an institutional repository. It supports the principles of open access by making the research outputs of the University available in digital form. Copyright of the items stored in RaY reside with the authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full text items free of charge, and may download a copy for private study or non-commercial research. For further reuse terms, see licence terms governing individual outputs. Institutional Repository Policy Statement RaY Research at the University of York St John For more information please contact RaY at ray@yorksj.ac.uk https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/ils/repository-policies/ mailto:ray@yorksj.ac.uk 1 Abstract: The article uses an inactive creative period to consider drawing as a type of fiction. The writing style adheres to academic conventions, however the author’s autobiographical experiences and wonderings are critical in exploring drawings fictions. It revisits making and thinking to explore drawing and philosophizing as speculative commutable passages of exploration and inquiry. The article chronicles the preparation of fictional drawings for a Fictional Museum of Drawing created by Phil Sawdon. This article reworks Sawdons site of fictional drawing, advocating drawings fictions as twofold, as rooted in foresight where predisposed thinking is navigated and anticipation reigns. The other recognition of fiction focuses upon the material illusions of thought. It plays on the autobiographical disposition of drawing/writing redrafting spatial origination of words to become diverse and contradictory graphics of language that displace the blank page. The fictions of the drawings/writings reviewed in the paper pressure syntactical devices and worded conventions, where the works reorganize conventions from both drawing and writing using illusion and paradox to unsteady their material. 2 The magnified glass of liberation: A review of fictional drawings Lucy O’Donnell York St John University This paper reflects upon the paradoxical process of making drawings for Phil Sawdon’s ‘Fictional Museum of Drawing’ published by Fukt Magazine 13 (2014).1 It chronicles the creation of fictional drawings for a fictional museum to foreground drawings material and speculative activities that perform on the parameters of fiction. The drawings employ words and can be thought of as hybrid drawings/writings. This brings debates from drawing/writing to the project, particularly with regard to revisiting material possibilities. The dilemma of making drawings for a space that does not exist is used to reflect upon how predisposed thinking is navigated by drawing by interweaving foresight and hindsight. The writing style of this article adheres to academic conventions, however the voice is heard wondering and could, at times, be thought of as poetic and playful, thereby teasing out the fictions embedded in the project. This deliberate reference to the author recalls a period of difficulty in making drawings and its emotional effects. This method crucially draws on/out the parameters of fiction embedded in both processes of thinking and making. It makes links between the methods of drawings and philosophizing as critical modes of thought, exploration, and expression to propose that material thinking and speculative hesitations are types of fiction. The accounts of making fictional drawings for a fictional museum are presented in this paper through a fundamentally contradictory practice that privileges fiction. This acknowledges Alan Badiou’s (2006) notion of drawing as a constructive deconstruction in order to 1 The ‘Fictional Museum of Drawing’ is ongoing, Phil Sawdon describes himself as keeper, and his undertakings can be viewed here http://philsawdon.tumblr.com. Accessed November 2016. His ‘Fictional Museum of Drawing’ can be understood as a repository of articles and a conceptual space for much of his creative and research work and an account was published by Fukt Magazine in 2014 where words, readymade propositions, parlance, bricolage and other marks join together. Although their composition utilized the organizational features of Microsoft Word, it also demonstrated/signified/employed a break from linear syntactical modes. Here the drawing is presented within the words, their meaning and placement composed and interwoven with other markings. The term Fictional Museum of Drawing is used in this article to represent a fictional space, one that does not physically exist. 3 understand its methods, which are bound between foresight and hindsight, become an ultimately speculative act. This article goes on to propose possibilities for harvesting drawings, review particular works (The Prison Drawing Project, Travelling, flickering and re- framing and This page has intentionally been left blank, parts 1 & 2) and concludes with a summary of how such an absurd project reopened the irregular territories of drawing. Procrastination Research Organization: anxious and unknown This week the PRO (Procrastination Research Organization) postponed the monthly meeting in order for its members to mull over other significances. The PRO is an invented group, used here to make reference to the pandemic that affects academics, where forecasting obscures research production. The preparations for my show at the ‘Fictional Museum of Drawing’ were ever increasingly inactive, so for me, this took precedence. There were two pressing concerns, both needing attention. Firstly, it was important for the practice to reflect and convey its critical concerns: to perform in the parameters of fiction. The drawings proposed for the ‘Fictional Museum of Drawing’ aspired to be equipped with imagined, fictitious, story bound and false propositions; they were to play amongst one of contemporary drawings’ frequent preoccupations: expanded fields and the pleasures of illusion. These fictional drawings were to defer material, physical and actual junk, softening the pressures of site, composition, reading and interpretation. Preparing for the show was proving complex. The drawings often remained in my head and wouldn’t come out; they were hosted by aspirations. The drawings were afraid of the white paper, anxious of the unknown and indefinite, frigid and afraid of being wrong, afraid of laying bare witness for others to make judgment. But paradoxically, I wondered if they were not tied by materiality but, instead, hosted by aspirations, could these be the most glorious fictional drawings of them all? These drawings nestle naked as they day they were not born, miscarriages; material of conception that stay so close to the mother it becomes synonymous with her. Ideas of matter and mattering had been consistent in my reflections of drawing. Catherine de Zegher (2006) makes associations between drawing gestures and the bond between mother and child by identifying particular parallels between the extended arm moving 4 away from the body as an equivalent behavior made by children when reaching out for a departing mother: ‘In the act of drawing, the extended arm and hand away from the bodily axis seems to correspond to the very gesture involved in the first separation (and exploration) where the child reaches out to the departing mother[…] Informed at once by rupture and reciprocity, drawing constitutes a space of relation in which the thrown-out gesture conjures up a trace seemingly tied to this movement used to the retrieve the thought that has been cast out’. (de Zegher 2006: 214-15) These thoughts around the relationships between child and mother resonate with experiences of personal loss, where the body unexpectedly casts away a pregnancy. Here the ‘thrown out gesture’ is the first and final separation; the casting away is absolute and the thrown out gesture is permanently contained, never to retrieve thought or aspirations. My experience of listening to a doctor change their language from baby to ‘material of conception’, has led me to return to the phrase in order to also deliberate drawings’ fictions. Here, in a singular moment the understanding of my unborn child had broken down. This become a catalyst for me to revisit the absurdity of syntactical devices and worded conventions. I was influenced by this language paradox, where the autobiographical investment in drawing was to override permanence and revisit the relationship between making and thinking. The miscarried pregnancies wilted ambitions and the drawings lingered in misty aspirations. This indistinct place muted any warning bells that ring to alert caution of the perils of predisposed thinking/making activities, where actualizing is ultimately delayed. It seemed irregular drawing territories were being unveiled, where act lingers in ambition, seizing upon Alan Badiou’s ‘constructed deconstruction’. Through fraternizing with foresight and hindsight, the collaboration between the known and the cautious places in between became a reflective space that could project knowledge onto a foresight suspended by anticipation, sagacity, and shrewdness. This openness gave the drawings permission to enter unpatrolled terrains, where rules are inadequate and anticipation reigns. This undefended drawings had no resistance to marksmen or mutiny; without the predisposed thinking it was an unprotected space 5 exposed to the elements once again, where line, tone, texture, form/mass, colour and perspective can be reconsidered. Harvesting the false: Preparing for the show These drawings for the show were not necessarily ‘drawn’ and are, instead, better described as ‘harvested’, as this gives precedence to condition and preparation, where a formula is reliable enough to reap crops. So in initial perpetrations for the show I looked back to bubbling thoughts and discarded possibilities bound in sketchbooks. These trace back and forth from idea to execution, from head to hand, from sound to site, from pondering to bemused (and more bemused); marks, ideas, propositions and notes meddled together posing as paths to follow, possibilizing upon, opening up the maybes, and giving respiratory relief to the taxidermy of fixed needs. In a bid to examine dialogues between theory and practice Nicolas Davy (2006) described the dangers of philosophy as taxidermy: where nothing can escape alive. This mode of thinking is bound up in its course of scrutiny, which prejudices its direction and leaves it suspended in its material articulation. The graphic works on paper lay bare the seen and propose the unseen, which is narrated by the gesture of the hand: its speed and pressure recounting the process of marking thought. My drawing practice often used words, letters and punctuations in fragments in order to wonder about drawings syntax. By bringing drawing/writing together, a constructed deconstruction of both took place, questioning foundations of how we think and communicate. Recently for ‘The Prison Drawing Project’ I focused upon the parallel roles of the paper drawing support and the enclosed prison cell as jointly restricted spaces where activities are conscious of their boundaries. This project was held at The Old Borough of Scarborough Jail in February 2016, and the drawings were exhibited within the individual cells. This restricted space allowed a certain type of curatorial approach, where the boundaries of the space and the methods, materials and subjects employed by the artists were all compounded in order to interrogate contemporary drawing practices as paradoxically open-ended. The interrogation of these borders outline drawings’ critical edges as places ‘with play’, which licenses constant change. Here the drawing/writing inscriptions and their wondering navigation(s) become the focus of the work by repeatedly redrafting the pages of my PhD thesis. The paper became a type of constituent where thoughts are caught, overlaid and replayed, making 6 reference to the confined spaces of the page and cell as a limited place to play out thinking. This redrafting process sustained ambiguity by creating a blended mass of information that obliterated the typed text and drawings; instead drawing out an alternative marked semiosis that was performed in the cell as rephrased gestures (see figures 1–5). Molded by the process, these paper worlds allowed opportunities to reveal themselves where possibilities to unfold and the syntax, or fiction, of the drawing evolves within the doing; seizing the descriptive currency of the material, the word play creates a knowing distance between conventional syntactical devices and becomes open-ended and speculative. The drawings for the ‘Fictional Museum of Drawing’ were ideal at adopting a speculative sovereignty. They had to be prepared and harvested in a sprit that reveled in the theater of illusion, mystery and, of course, ambiguity I thought of Avis Newman in 2003 positioning drawing as a communication device beyond or before language. For the drawings in the ‘Fictional Museum’ these ideas redirected any primitive critique, and, instead, speculated upon the embryonic and emergent fictions. Possibilities unfolded within their acts and speaking took forms unbound to syntactical structures; like the Re-Aligning Vision of León Ferrari’s drawings, or silent handwritten words that tell things that word’s cannot say, the drawings evolved in worlds particular to themselves. But how do you harvest a drawing that evolves within the doing, without ‘doing’ it? The drawings for the show needed to perform in the parameters of fiction, and I wondered about the elasticity of this position. Could all drawing be fictitious? When a pencil comes in contact with paper, the gestures generate marks onto a paper surface, creating illusions that reference something other (form, subject, gesture, or manner). Our principles of conjuring up volume, form, matter, and subject are manufactured and manipulated. 7 Figure 1: Drawing Vignettes. 2016 8 Figure 2: Drawing Vignettes. 2016 9 Figure 3: Drawing Vignettes. 2016 10 Figure 4: Drawing Vignettes. 2016 11 Figure 5: Drawing Vignettes. 2016 12 The speculative fictional drawings were taking place ubiquitously as I moved from place to place between work, studio, and home playing with words in my thoughts and on paper. At the annual Society of Artistic Research 2016 conference, I listened to Alva Noë proposing philosophy as a reorganizational practice that needed to ‘fuck things up’ in order to question and review. This proposition intensified my word play as mirroring reflections of uncertainty that could displace marking activities and reflect thought as dwelling in speculation. This speculation was unsteady or flickering, as it was neither ‘on nor off’ or ‘thing or thought’ in between material ‘junk’ and in transit. Alan Badiou (2006) describes drawing as a fragile ‘movable reciprocity between existence and inexistence’. Here drawing is a place that dis(places) all things in it, likened to performance or happenings, with ‘vanishing succession of gestures, pictures and voices’, as a ‘constructive deconstruction’ that is ‘more real’ than the stimuli. Drawing as a description without place, certainly appeared to ‘fuck things up’ in the sprit of Alva Noë. Whilst on my train commute home my body in its immobile mobility struck cords with Michel de Certeau in his Practices of Everyday Life (1998) where with nothing to do one is in a state of reason. And this static speculative experience of the world, where the sensation of static mobility is heightened, became my place to draw. The expanded ‘composition’ was ubiquitous; where, as the commuter, I took ‘thoughtful workouts’ gazing out of the window speculating about unfeasible drawings. My journeys from A to B, pause, stop and move through fleeting territories: jointly commuting and speculating. This displacement within space heightened these embodied senses and I wondered if drawing with words were like silent stories, souvenirs of the commuter. The initial drawing travelling, flickering and reframing combined compositional fictions with the imaginary, fuse the peripatetic thinking making being wondering (See Fig 6, embedded in the text page). 13 travelling, flickering and re- framing ‘Fucking it up’ with Alva Noë: employing his notion of philosophy as a reorganizational practice to make these notes and keynotes from ‘WRITING’ The SAR International Conference of Writing, 2016. I’m training (on a train) […] (budumbudum) exercising & traveling (budumbudum) tacking a thoughtful workout (budumbudum) work ings out (and in) (and out)… (budumbudum) flickering drawing into writing . . . (budumbudum) flickering on off over back on off over back on off over back (on a train) (budumbudum) flickering… (and travelling) between drawing & writing (on a train) words: wording words telling of language denoting self … Henri Michaux drawing on in over (through) self and language or self/language (drawing & writing) (in out) (budumbudum) (in out) (budumbudum) (in and out) (budumbudum) (in/out) (budumbudum) Hit …the ‘picture’ and the self. (i propose this) hard. Narrative or (i propose me) Typing to proposition peek into ice cream vans that play songs of flat Dutch spaces and opened out spaces, postulating. Seeing drawing thinking writing (seeing/drawing/thinking/writing) Dwelling in out over Flickering on Flickering The trains training (and Kate Liston) Flickering Whose body builders erect Dasein & mnemonic symbols Flickering fused with protein supplement Casein Flickering Flickering f I’m Flickering l training Flickering i […] Flickering c exercising & traveling Flickering k as a thoughtful workout Flickering e work ings out (and in) (and out)… Flickering r 14 Figure 6: Travelling, Flickering and Reframing 2016. Travelling, flickering and reframing played with words as drawing materials and displaced conventional written compositions. By using the words as drawing materials, it was important to alter any stabilized meaning and to open up syntactical structures. The authority, or trust, we invest in words is probably upheld by a conviction to a stabilized communicative system underpinned by pre-determined meaning. However, this malfunctions within The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, which confirms the contrary: language evolves and its denotation is recycled. A conversation I once had with John Court rang in my mind when he asserted, ‘you can’t trust words’.2 Revisiting and reposting words and notations reclaimed conventions and alternative fictions for the line and paragraph. The possible play of conventions embedded within the written order of lines drew thoughts back to poet bpNichol, whose practice is arguably underpinned by an appreciation of and fascination with lines of all types. Paul Dutton describes this as poetic play as lines, prose lines, narrative lines, plot lines, typed lines and lines of type, voice lines, drawn lines, solid lines, broken lines, train lines, and all the fine lines of and in communication, especially lines of questing, and lines of thought. 3 This preoccupation emerged strongly in bpNichol’s work, ‘Of Lines: Some Drawings’, featuring thirteen textured pages, each with a single silver line drawing, and underlined with titles such as ‘ Line #1’, ‘Drawing of Line #1’, ‘ Line #4(drawn whilst thinking of previous lines)’, and ‘Line Drawn as Response To An Inner Pressure to Drawn Another Line While Resisting The Urge To Call it Line#5’ (1981). When drawing with words, the ‘silent image’ is challenged and the silent picture of picture poesies is liberated. Equally, the conventions of speaking, silence, interpretation, and subject are all unsteadied. In Signs (1964), Merleau-Ponty suggests language as partly silent, as it does not directly voice an original ‘thing’. This emphasizes the allusive and oblique characteristics of language, and instead Merleau- Ponty advocates meaning lying in the movement of speech with its embodied gestures, silences, and responses created by location and acts. Drawing with words 2 John Court discussed his performance practice when he was visiting speaker at York St John University on 28th November 2016. His output includes performance, sculpture and video and he considers his work to be fundamentally concerned with drawing, in that drawing connects the elements of line, movement, space and time. See http://www.johncourtnow.com Accessed October 2016 3 See http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/DTTN-BPV.HTM. Accessed July 2014 15 removes the stability of worded meaning redirecting the possibilities of ‘subject’ once suspended in its worded format. The reorganization jointly displaces expectations of the letters, page, subject, and certainty and so instead, words utilized as material for drawing can speculate and possibilize alternative fictions of both the paper, page, and its subjects. In 2013 The Drawing Room, London and The Drawing Center, New York curated Drawing Language. These works expose the union of drawing/writing as a mode to evoke multiple meanings by separating language from a linear narrative, breaking the presentation of words and phrases, incorporating multiple and contradictory graphic language forms, and creating forms from phonetic words and expressions. The drawings for the ‘Fictional Museum of Drawing’ had to be prepared and harvested in a spirit that reveled in the theater of illusion, mystery and, of course, ambiguity.4 It was here in the theater of illusion the sign and signified, Perian symbols and the indexical could be dispersed through new and irregular territories created within the unfolding drawing. In these territories, the paper margins regenerate fixed syntactical constructions, where the untrustworthy word deviates from structured customs conjuring illusion and paradox and becoming fiction drawing. I enjoyed words ‘untrustworthy nature’ and reflected upon their displacement while making This page has intentionally been left blank (part 1) 4 Phil Sawdons: A Drawing Parlay (2011) accounts for ‘The Fictional Museum of Drawing’: ‘The accumulative and ekphrastic guide to a fallacious building: A heuristic architecture of found words … readymade propositions, parlance and bricolage for no such place in the middle, the furthest place from fixed points of view.’ http://www.soanyway.org.uk/philsawdondrawingparlay.htm Accessed November 2016 16 This page has intentionally been left blank 17 Figure 7: This page has intentionally been left blank (part 1) 2017. Paradoxically the words inhabit the white page comforting the possible anxiety of its blankness. This work magnified the fictions of the page, inhabiting a halfway house, where the words are asked to inform the reader of absent words inciting absurd tensions. This page has intentionally been left blank (part 2) followed on from part 1. Here I scanned part 1 as a Jpeg and, by doing so, reframed and reinserted the boundary back onto the page. Here the size of the text was reduced and a thin gray line ran down the right hand side of the work subtly making reference to the edge of the paper. Figure 8: This page has intentionally been left blank (part 2). 2017 18 In these drawings, the blank page is a provocation to disturb the interplay between hindsight and foresight. The whiteness and the words heightened the anxiety of possibilities creating a momentum of possibilities and fictions. The gaps magnify the placement and displacement of subject and are crucial for fictional drawings. For Merleau-Ponty, worded meaning equally lies in what is unsaid, and the gaps between the words. These occurrences pose tensions for both speakers and listeners, while reinforcing the reliance of language upon its placement and displacement. The process of encountering the blank paper directs attention to both the boundary and the void: the space which is yet to be actualized. Jose Rabassa (1993) and Yves Bonnefoy (1994) identify opportunities to build space in the blank paper. Rabassa reflects upon the journal of Christopher Columbus, identifying parallels between writing/drawing and navigation, as the pen navigates the ‘fiction’ of the blank page the writer/explorer claims ownership of text and territory. The ‘fiction’ of the blank page suggests it already has chronicles, which leads to the anticipation of making discoveries by entering it. ‘…the white page is the unknowing which surpasses his ability to know…venturing into that white-ness and discovering there the precarity of all that has been acquired, the vanity of wants, and thus drawing near to that reality-unity that language robs us of. In this way, the drawing, the ‘great’ drawing, will be poetry’. Bonnefoy (1994: 15) The poetry of drawing breaks the whiteness, invites precarity, and its fictions can jointly construct and deconstruct, as Alan Badiou describes the fragile ‘movable reciprocity between existence and inexistence’. The paper support and its conventional whiteness becomes a place to wonder, as much as the unfolding activities that occupy it. The blank sheet of paper is a field for projection, for discovery and innovation. This concept forms part of a discussion between Avis Newman and Catherine de Zegher, where the blank sheet is described as ‘an undifferentiated space’ and ‘the entity of possibility’ (2003: 247). There is also a described and felt fear connected with this space, related by Bonnefoy (1994: 15) as an ‘unknowing’. And here Newman talks of the white page as a place of action: ‘ ...the fascination and the fear of the white page is the site in which one enacts differentiation as soon as a mark or sign is made It changes 19 the non-ness and establishes a place of action. As soon as that act occurs the paper becomes something’ Newman (2003: 247) Conclusion: Fictional Drawing A method to unsteady material junk The drawings for the ‘Fictional Museum of Drawing’ enjoyed the possibilities of playing in illusion and contradiction. The inactivities or fictions of making reconsidered words and their paper support become plausible tools that enable speculation to be seized as a method in conjuring illusion and paradox. Here, material conventions assertively promotes unknowing in a bid to allow alternative possibilities unfold. New Materialism, according to Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (2008), stresses the importance of a review of language structures to reframe the ontological translation of experiences. Language structures are designated as a means to apprehend the ontological without constituting it. Matter is analytical currency for ‘reorganizing’ ontological and phenomenological experiences and borrowing notions from New Materialism where the body as a site of mattering, rather than matter, associates the becoming, interplay, and critical dialogue between foresight and hindsight. Placing and displacing are critical to fictional drawings where poetic freedom and flexible interpretation need speculative investment. These poetics permit the reframing of words into alternative spatial organizations legitimatizing open- ended spaces for graphic thoughts to dwell. Once removed from a dictionary, words are movable raw materials, unstable, untrustworthy and become something unexpected when time and place repositions them. The word play of fictional drawing opens irregular territories by breaking borders, operating in margins, and displacing activities and material; it becomes multiple or contradictory graphics of language. Here in the ‘Fictional Museum of Drawing’ speculation is associated with fiction through the supposed, and the imagined is conjured up from prospect and possibilizing. The employment of speculation as principal method reorganizes the spaces of thinking/drawing through revisiting their conventions and extending any dependence upon assumed material processes. This gives license to transient unstable activities that are so deeply embedded in speculation; their fiction can use the blanks and gaps to override conventional construction methods. The notion of drawing as a 20 constructive deconstruction can be related to the paper’s nothingness, which is apprehended by its boundary edges that pose anticipation. This is where Alva Noë’s philosophy as a reorganizational practice sets the metronome ticking between foresight and hindsight, unsteadying material junk to assume poetic wonder for drawing/writing within the ‘Fictional Museum of Drawing’. These works are driven by wonder to revisit what is known and assumed, where by avoiding material limits agreed, assumed rules can be broken and reshaped.5 The fictions of drawing are twofold: the first rooted in foresight where anticipation overshadows, the other performs in illusion where the communication of thought is material. Drawings’ analytical agency as a conduit of thought is probably conceded within its material, and for the fictional drawings the physical stuff can hover between what we know and possiblize something other. This interaction with physical ‘stuff’ enabled this article to review of language structures appraising material by making stuff matter. By drawing with words, or making hybrid drawing/writings, the language structures of each are by default, deconstructed through the activity of analysis. The doing of drawing becomes a thoughtful workout, where the marking out unites words and speculations carry on independent of material and within a speculative state. This revisited the routine of drawing as a way of thinking that could become freed from material, rerouted through speculation and uncertainty. The periods of not making or the gaps, the spaces between, became opportunity to revisit possibilities, reorganize, and deconstruct in order to construct a new. These gaps are home to anxieties and 5 The blank space, its void, erasure of ‘stuff’ or bareness all point back to the subject of nothing, where construction methods or subjects utilize the possibilities of absence or ‘nothing’ playing into ideas of something. Examples of these undoubtedly include Robert Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning drawing, or his White paintings. Tom Friedman’s ‘Erased Playboy’ (1992) makes a nod to the erased De Kooning, re-questioning the efficacy of absence as an artistic trope. Other noteworthy examples that question the drawn, written or space of the page include, Gianni Motti's invisible ink drawings (1989): drawings made with invisible ink, visible only for a brief instant before vanishing. David Shrigley’s (2002) ‘Then There is Something’ from Human Achievement, whose hand-written words notate nothing by repeating the words ‘there is nothing’ down the page, which is interrupted by then there is something for a brief moment, then there is nothing again. Or ‘This Book is Intentionally Blank’, exhibited at the ‘Nothing’ exhibition (2001) at Cameraworks Gallery, made from recycled National Curriculum paper collected after it became defunct in 1989. Over 4 tons was first exhibited as waste, then later recycled and turned into white paper that was returned to the schools as blank drawing-paper; these politicized white pages make way for the new. An empty volume called ‘The Nothing Book’, published in 1974 & 1976 acts as an invitation to write your own book, posing the possibility as open that it can be whatever we want it to be. ‘The Book of Nothing’ (2000) by mathematician and cosmologist, John Barrow, drew from mathematics, theology, philosophy, literature, particle physics, and cosmology to explore our fascination and imagination around vacuity, or the absence of matter. 21 discoveries where drawings precarity takes over. The quiet gestures of unseen drawings that buzz in the head were let out for this project, manoeuvring anxieties to discoveries to speculations. This unorthodox actualizing reviewed predetermined propositions, escorted between foresight and hindsight that bounced in rhythm reviewing and reconsidering descriptions of thought. These embryonic and emergent fictions where possibilities unfold within their act, moving words and worlds around in alternative formats can became the ultimate speculative act. The fictions of drawing create an alterative access for thought: always ajar, always speculating. References Alaimo, S. and Hekman, S. (2008) Material Feminisms, Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University. Badiou, A. (2006) Drawing, Lacanian Ink. Bonnefoy, Y. (1994) Overture: The Narrow Path Toward the Whole, (eds) Martine Reid Boundaries: Writing and Drawing, Yale French Studies. Cixous, H. (2005) Without End, No, State of Drawingness, No, Rather: The Executioner's Taking Off (trans, by .C. A. F. MacGillivray), in Stigmata: escaping texts; with a foreword by Jacques Derrida, London: Routledge. Davey, N. (2006) Art in theoria in L. Holdridge and K. Macleod (eds.), Thinking Through Art: reflections on art as research, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. De Certeau, M. (1998) Practices of Everyday Life, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. De Zegher, C. (2006) The Inside is the Outside: The Relational as the (Feminine) Space, in C. Armstrong and C. de Zegher, Women Artists at the Millennium, MIT Press. De Zegher, C. (2010) A Century under the Sign of the Line: Drawing and its Extension (1910-2010), in On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Merleau-Ponty. M. (1964), Signs, Northwestern University Press. Newman, A. & De Zegher, (2003) C. Conversation. In DE ZEGHER, C. ed. The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, Selected from the Tate Collection. London. New York: Tate Publishing & The Drawing Center. 22 O’Donnell, L. (2016) Drawing Vignettes : ... perpetual becoming(s), PhD Thesis Loughborough: Loughborough University. Rabassa, J. (1993) Inventing A-M-E-R-I-C-A: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Reid Boundaries: Writing and Drawing, Yale French Studies. Ramirez, M. C. (1997), Re-Aligning Vision - Alternative currents in South American Drawing, The University of Texas at Austin. Sawdon, P. (2011), A Drawing Parlay, Soanyway.