Movement Archives: Domestic Spaces
marker on cotton paper
This body of work explores the movement and patterns of the routines and interactions of daily life. I am a wife and mother of young children and much of my time is spent at home with my family. We have well-trodden paths and rest stops all over the house. These drawings are easily maps of our simple domestic travels.
For this work I take between five and twenty minutes of video of my family, including myself, within in a specific room of our home. Each drawing represents its own span of time in any one room of the house. I then watch each video at real time and, adapting the method used for blind contour drawing, I draw the path and impression of movement of each member of the family. Blind contour drawings are made by fixing one’s eyes on the subject and drawing its contour or outline continuously without lifting the pen or looking at the paper. In this case walking, running, crawling, jumping, dancing, sitting and other information is illustrated by line quality – the heavy, fine, bold, quick, or slow characteristics of the line – documenting the patterns of movement and interaction.