24
The rule that I set myself was to complete one drawing an hour, while in active contemplation of maternity - whether my experiences of motherhood or more abstractly about maternity as a concept. These drawings were aided, while simultaneously made more challenging, by the location of the home and other situational limits and constraints: duration (one an hour), the page, two colours, being at home on the floor of my front room, the unplannedness.
Over the 24 hours I was interrupted on numerous occasions. During child waking hours I was interrupted by my keen audience, with the sounds of cartoons, fighting, laughing and the general hullaballoo of everyday family life. At night, it was silent, lonely and cold as I sat on the floor. It was physically gruelling and mentally challenging. This is staying awake all night, and not how I have done it before while I have been in the adrenaline throes of labour, or a drug-induced all-nighter – both stimulating events that force hyperness. But these drawings are perhaps hyper:
there is another drawing that emerges in the absence of any antecedent stimulus or provocation; which does not follow, but is initiated instead in the hope of making manifest that which could not have been conceived of at the outset not planned in advance. In doing and being so, this drawing draws on – by making a demand on – the observable world nor on the powers of the imaginary, but simply attempts to bring forth, make appear. This is not about defining itself as autonomous activity, of establishing the limits of its own specificity. Rather, in withdrawing from the pressures of representing something else, drawing attempts to contemplate the terms of its own coming into being, performed as the infinitely reflexive loop of drawing drawing itself drawing.
Emma Cocker
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