Locating Self within Dissolved Boundaries
Lost in Drawing: Locating Self within Dissolved Boundaries used iterative production methods to create an archive of materials seen through a qualitative analytical lens. Drawings of each series are responses to the designing of an experience. More than 30 drawing experiments were created in forming the structure of the exegesis, catalogue, and spatial drawing installation ‘Los’.
Located in the expanded drawing practice field of research, the thesis explores methods of embodied intuitive drawing, and drawing as action, where the process of making is as significant as the outcome.
The study investigates the dissolution of fixed boundaries, challenging binary ways of thinking that often limit how we understand space and identity. Analysing through a spatial lens, dissolving bounded spaces introduces expanded threshold conditions, and perception became key in navigating these in-between spaces. The thesis employs experimental autoethnographic ideas that explore the subtle discomforts in the experience of navigating everyday controlled spaces and the built environment shaped by neurotypical expectations.
Lost as a condition was identified in the drawing process across various meanings: to be lost in thought, to lose yourself, and lost time. These concepts came through the practice in lost materials, whether discarded, re-interpreted, sacrificed (one material for another) or lost as part of the making process.
The exhibition ‘Los’ invited the audience to enter a layered, drawn experience that called attention to our differing perceptions and perspectives, immersing the user in an atmospheric expanded drawing. The tension between this public expression of self and the viewers’ inner self thus became part of the work.
