A dialogue with artist-writer Emma Cocker. Also as a spectator. She talked about leaning as sometimes a hard thing to do, especially for women. To be independent is to be strong, as good desirable and dependent as weak. But to lean can stabilise, and to accept support can be a decisive positive act. For the body leaning into the wall, it anchors and fixes one part of the body so another part can freely move. leaning is tilting.
Leaning into the wall.
The dorsal as an expansive force rather than a convergent forward advancement. An alternative to a persistent cultural progression. An opening up to peripheral, to twilight zones!, to a sinking back – slowing but not really slowing – something about time- and futures behind us as unseen and past unfolding in front of us as that which we can see, know, reflect upon.
hanging back in time
the drawing has its own embodied conditions and indexical immediacy. eye-hand co-ordination is disrupted. eyes have the ability to measure, to judge, to lead. here there is no measuring. there is a mechanical organisation of the body. drawing process and marks here are not to do with language.
the arms and hands and eyes gesture, but are not aiming to communicate or convey meaning to a spectator. I am engaged though in a process and activity of gesturing, of presenting gestural figurative movement. but things are flipped, the up, down, back, front, forwards, backwards are slightly messed up. hanging and leaning back into a bio-technological (David Wills)-mechanical human-figure-amoeba.
and one could say in the flipping of sense-making there is a horizontal organisation of the moving, drawing body in relation to itself and others.
a kind of presence that lingers, leans, tends, scans.
