The long way round: drawing to know by ‘not knowing’

Introduction

In this article, I reflect upon my artistic-geographical practice to examine how forms of expanded drawing can help human geographers cultivate artistic epistemological and ontological positions of ‘not knowing’. This work draws on my background as a visual artist and geographer. I describe three early field visits made over 4 months to a single site in Granton, North Edinburgh, during which I employed different methods of drawing. This fieldwork is part of my PhD project in human geography at the University of Edinburgh, in which I am investigating how artistic values such as ‘not knowing’ and ‘openness to chance’ might contribute to geographical research methodologies which can help us better understand marginal, post-industrial places. I am exploring these values by drawing, as an artist, in a small number of sites around Granton on a monthly basis over a period of 2 years. I am using a range of drawing methods, from conventional observational drawing to more experimental, expanded drawing practices in which I draw with materials such as clay or insert small drawings into the environment.

Granton is an ex-industrial area on the northern edge of Edinburgh, lying between post-war council estates and the Forth estuary (Figure 1). The gas works, quarrying and paper-making industries that once imported materials from and exported goods to Europe and beyond have long gone. ¹ Chain-link and Heras panel fences now buffer brownfield sites which are mainly empty and in varying states of disorder and sorting. The verges that border these fenced sites are weedy and littered. There are ‘edgeland’, transit spaces like this across Edinburgh, often situated between housing estates and retail parks and on the edges of cycle paths. ² This patch of unkempt land, which receives little care, sits close to manicured public spaces which have been created as part of Edinburgh’s coastal regeneration plan. ³

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Figure 1.

Site images, Waterfront Avenue, Granton, 2023. Photographs by Deirdre Macleod.

Artistically, ‘not knowing’ means beginning to work with ideas or images, materials or working methods without any pre-conceived idea of what might result. This might be an art or natural material which the artist has not used before, or an image cut from a newspaper which the artist begins to explore through drawing. Not knowing assumes no prior knowledge and can help artists make new associations between ideas and materials and to be open to moments of ‘what if’? ⁴ Expanded drawing refers to drawing practices which are defined less by the surface and materials with which they are made than their linearity. ⁵ It includes open-ended drawing practices which emphasise a process of drawing which may be ephemeral, provisional or tentative. ⁶

I argue here that expanded drawing conducted at early stages of research can help researchers cultivate a position of ‘not knowing’, so maintaining an openness to the possibilities of place and making aspects of that place available in ways that are not easily accessed through conventional research framings. Practising expanded drawing in situ may also offer alternative ways of interrogating place. Haptic engagement with, and entanglement in, the materiality of place can help draw attention to close encounters, events and moments, and to the cognitive connections made while drawing. This can break down pre-conceived object hierarchies and enable inanimate and animate things to ‘speak back’ and be heard more evenly by the researcher, revealing unexpected lines of enquiry. ⁷ Expanded drawing may also foster new relations between the researcher and their site. I propose that expanded drawing can be a form of ‘noticing-as-care’; a tentative artistic counter-strategy which can reveal the unevenness in the attention paid across post-industrial landscapes undergoing regeneration, where areas of profound neglect and hyper-curation often sit close to each other. This may be a small, but significant, critical contribution to understanding, and perhaps ameliorating, these particular dynamics of urban space.

Approaching

I kneel against the fence, among gravel and bramble vines, at one of its unravelling points. I need to be close to see the grain and the windings of the wires, but, from here, I can’t take it all in. I move my head up and down, from the top of the fence to the sketchbook on my knees. I fix my gaze on the overlocking wires, trying to memorise their rhythms and overlaps. Looking down, I try to recall the over and under: drawing, correcting, fixing.

Damaged plastic casing lets in water and sea salt, eroding wire to rust flakes. I feel like I’m seeing at the pace of chemical change, at particulate scale. My drawing is laborious, but the fence resists being known. I could pack up, walk away and seek a different view, but I don’t. Looking up, I check, catch and hold it until my pencil traces these image fragments on paper. Feeling the weak November sun on my back, and damp under my knees, I begin to understand what this slow, close and frustrating practice of drawing can show me (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Chain link fence drawings by Deirdre Macleod. Graphite on paper, 2024.

Drawing so close to a high fence was uncomfortable. It meant extending my spine repeatedly so that I could review and correct my drawing. But these physical challenges helped create a muscle memory of the fence, offering me embodied knowledge about it and about the process of drawing. Drawing in this way is unpredictable. I didn’t know that my knees would get damp, that I’d smell rotting algae trapped in the torn mesh or see brambles interweaving themselves so tightly into the fence as to seem part of it. Emma Cocker argues that, ‘drawing is a contingent form of working knowledge . . . a form of knowledge born of the moment’. ⁸ Surprise encounters through drawing mean that we must cede control of situations and, as we do so, we must find new mooring points, re-making ourselves and our relationships to other people and things in the process. ⁹

Encountering

I press some clay into a piece of the fence that has lost its structure, peeling it away and turning it so that it picks up more marks. Wind through the fence cools my hands and dries the clay. I feel its springy surface take my weight, giving and resisting gently.

Now, I’m pushing the clay into the edge of the mesh, where it is uncoiling. It becomes caught in metal loops, its fleshiness held between the wires. Releasing it, I roll the clay between my hands – it’s becoming leathery. My hands are coated with residue and have picked up bramble leaves and rust particles too.

I thread the clay through diamond-shaped holes, watching as it flakes and splits. As I twist it, I use the tips of my fingers. The cold tooth of the galvanised wire feels matte and almost chalky. It catches my skin and I can feel, and then see, tiny pits of erosion. I pick up the clay and knead it, warming my hands for a while, before starting again (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Fence drawings by Deirdre Macleod. Air-drying modelling clay, 2024.

In my PhD fieldwork in Granton, I have tried to maintain an intuitive and open form of fieldwork enquiry. This echoes the approach and methods used by artist-researcher Polly Stanton, which she describes as ‘making-with the field’. ¹⁰ By ‘making-with’, Stanton means practices through which she becomes susceptible to the place in which she is working, becoming affected by it as she works within it. ‘Making-with’ hints at a certain porosity and vulnerability of the researcher towards the site and an interdependent relationship between the researcher and place. ¹¹

I chose to weave with the fence, drawing lines of rolled clay through its open metal structure. This is a form of expanded drawing that uses an unconventional surface and drawing material and which emphasises process over output. ¹²

Weaving is a haptic engagement which forces a change of pace; fingers can only work so fast. As I worked, I had to slow down as the clay became less pliable. More aware of the connection between my body and the materiality of the fence, I gained a better sense of the fence as a real thing in the world, something which exists among (and is damaged by) human, animal and environmental forces. I became more vulnerable to my site, ceding some of the control which abstract vision assumes, becoming aware of the situated nature of my engagement with the fence. ¹³

Exploring a site slowly with hands as well as eyes encourages sensations and thoughts to be drawn together, in a particular place and time. I became aware of the sharp shadows cast by strong sunlight on the clay and fence. Natural light would likely diminish if this land were developed, affecting the people and animals that pass through it and the plants that grow there.

Interrogating

I’ve been drawing parabolic shapes in my studio for the last year. Parabolas concentrate the beams emitted from lighthouses – they change the path of light. There is a lighthouse not far from my fieldwork site. I think about that lighthouse and the sunlight on the fence where I was working. I decide to bring some of my parabolas to the site, to see whether, and how, they might ‘speak’ to it.

My parabolic drawings are small and are made of mirrored card. In my studio, they have a distinct warp-shiny presence - they don’t blend in. But here, between brambles and grass tufts, they almost disappear. I can find them only by looking for subtle disjunctions amongst the vines and leaves.

Just as these little drawings reflect, they also alter what is around them. I see sidelongs and underneaths. Fragments of steel and thorn make surprise connections. I peer backwards into a leafy tunnel and a worm is cast up to the sky (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Parabolic drawings by Deirdre Macleod. Folded mirrored card, 2024.

The parabolic drawings diffracted and conjoined slivers of space, creating partial, particular images. But if we are working only with unrepeatable fragments, close-ups and details, how can we ask a geographically meaningful question of a site? Essayist Emily Ogden argues for paying attention to all of the seemingly trivial, multiple and unconnected fragments of experience, because, sometimes, like a shoal of sprats, they ‘trace the outline of a whale’. ¹⁴ In other words, the seemingly chaotic materials of everyday life, which at first seem unknowable, can help us apprehend a bigger picture.

A bigger picture need not necessarily be a complete one – say, a ‘vista’ in the field. The world is messy; it looks and feels different every time we step into it and move within it. In this context, fragments might actually be more meaningful because they are incomplete and agile. They are what Jess Linz and Anna Secor call ‘counter-intuitive ways of (un)knowing’. ¹⁵ The fragments that we glean from multiple, overlapping and fluid registers of drawing might well be powerful indicators of what really matters to us in our more vulnerable state. ¹⁶

Expanded drawing and ‘noticing-as-care’

My research site in Granton sits close to spaces that attract ‘hyper care’ in the form of landscape design, litter-picking and horticultural ‘manicuring’ because they have been developed as part of Edinburgh’s coastal regeneration plan. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa argues that ‘to care about something, or for somebody, is inevitably to create relation’. ¹⁷ I would argue that the reverse is also true; that creating a relationship with something or someone cultivates care. Drawing, which creates a relation between a person and the thing that they are choosing to draw or ‘make-with’, is a way of caring for that thing. Care for my research site is expressed through a slow and persistent physical interrogation of the neglected and insignificant. I do not seek to know the totality of this place through drawing, but to unsettle and configure my place within it differently, so as to see it more clearly.

The slow, sensory and intimate tactics of expanded drawing have made me aware of this uneven distribution of attention within a relatively small geographical area. Expanded drawing’s capacity to encourage a familiar, even affectionate, relation with a site suggests tentative potential as a care-full counter-strategy for examining spaces of uneven regeneration.

The long way round

I found my research sites by chance. During my first visits to Granton, as I developed my PhD project proposal, I was drawn to things that made me pause unexpectedly and look more closely, such as irregularities in a fence or winter light illuminating a strip of enclosed land. I deliberately avoided researching the histories or ownership of these patches of land so that I would not think about them in particular ways. Using expanded drawing to pursue ‘clueless’ approaches to field research has allowed me to relate differently to the field, re-making my relationship to it through unexpected material encounters. The value of expanded drawing appears to lie in its capacity to direct attention to hitherto unnoticed things about a site by drawing together a range of sensory and imaginative responses within the researcher to the materiality of site objects. For example, rather than seeing the fences simply as an adjunct to the land that they enclose, I focussed on them. At close range, I felt the fences’ construction and the processes of weathering that they were experiencing. I observed evidence of human and animal passage through them and imagined the effect of development upon those that use this land. These are potential starting points for research that I might not have considered had I approached my site visits in a more conventional way. In this way, expanded drawing allows inanimate and animate things to ‘speak back’ and be seen more clearly by the researcher. As such, we might begin to sketch out a tactical role for expanded drawing as form of ‘noticing-as-care’ for places that seem insignificant or off-putting.

Undoubtedly, there are more direct ways of identifying a research subject; this is unashamedly the long way round. Moreover, cultivating ‘not knowing’ through expanded drawing is not easy. It is a mental and physical discipline as well as a visual and tactile one. But perhaps this is what we should expect if we accept that finding things out is an untidy process. As Diann Bauer argues: ‘it is not enough to hover in the familiar. We must inhabit the alien – not through mastery or domination but through the [. . .] recognition of the broadest sense of “we” and our diverse capacities’. ¹⁸ The long way round may be more arduous, but by using our bodies and minds, our spines and our hands to make-with these places, we show that they are significant to us and that we are fully implicated in their futures.