Hosted by the Drawing Research Group at Loughborough University
Tickets: https://buytickets.at/drawingresearchgroup/1248618
Chair: Rachel Gadsden-Hayton

Habitual Behaviour is the third in the series of DRN online events exploring drawing repetition. The panel brings together researchers investigating aspects of habitual behaviour in relation to repetition within contemporary drawing practice.

Lydia Halcrow‘s presentation will explore artists working through repetition and daily practices of
durational drawings to explore the emotional traces exposed through this ongoing action.
It will include reference to my own drawing practice that formed a practice-based PhD completed in 2022 as a mode of embodied and experimental mark-making made through the repetitive act of walking and scoring as a form of experimental drawing. The central premise of the presentation is that the act of repetition and time can only reveal a knowledge after it has unfolded and the repetitive marks made over a duration form a whole. The patterns revealed can tell alternative stories about body and place and about human emotions held in everyday encounters. The repetition thus becomes a ‘blind’ drawing process that documents daily encounters and emotions, with a deeper understanding of the entanglements of body and place emerging over the duration of the drawings.

Meera Curam’s presentation explores the intricate complexity of rhythm present in the cultural tradition of drawing Rangoli or Kolam. Rangoli is an everyday early morning practice, drawing patterns using rice flour or paste, stone powder, sand and red earth is known by many names in south India, such as Rangoli, Kolam, Muggulu and Alpana. While these patterns hold cultural prominence with deeper meanings and complex mathematical sequences, there is scope to understand the intricacies of sequences, intuition, and embodied knowledge.
The presentation expands on the practitioner’s intuitive embodied knowledge and innate ability to construct continuous, repetitive patterns through seemingly simple loop drawings. The fundamental rhythm of lines over dots evolves into intricate designs, prompting inquiry into the interconnectedness between mind and body movements. Drawing from Bourdieu’s theory of Social practice (Bourdieu, 1990) and applying the situated practice and habitus in connection with the everyday practice of Rangoli. Despite the cultural prominence of Rangoli patterns, their hidden complexity of rhythm, encompassing symmetry, asymmetry, and the organic flow of dots and lines, often remains unnoticed.
This paper aims to bridge the gap of acknowledging the intuitive knowledge system by offering insights into the often-overlooked complexity of rhythm within the seemingly mundane act of drawing Rangoli. By unravelling the sophistication inherent in this everyday cultural practice, the abstract contributes to a deeper understanding of the artistic and cultural dimensions embedded within the rhythmic intricacies of creating Rangoli.

References
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford University Press.
Nagarajan, V. (2018). Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology
in India- An Exploration of the Kolam. Oxford University Press.
Author’s Bio : Meera Curam is a Visual Artist and Textile Designer, presently
engaged in doctoral research at De Montfort University, Leicester, United
Kingdom. Her research delves into the Rangoli/Kolam tradition in South India
for her PhD. Her focus is on its embodied knowledge, underlining the
significance of Tangible and Intangible Heritage, and addressing the oversight
regarding the intuitive complex mathematical sequences employed by women
practitioners.

Junuka Deshpande‘s presentation will share examples of an autoethnographic exploration presenting a series of drawn responses to domestic encounters. These responses are aimed at making meaning of the experience of struggle /friction in an everyday repetitive routine of domestic space as a woman, mother, and an artist. Each encounter, like a terrain in a site, consists of an experience. Through drawings Junuka respond to expand the moment of feeling into a narrative, understanding it in parts through multiple drawn frames that create an illusion of movement.

Each drawing starts with a feeling that completes itself through subsequent drawings, building on the previous one. The surfaces over which Junuka draws are pages of a cookery book with recipes printed on them. The names of the recipes, the ingredients, quantities, and instructions provide a recurring background to the drawings creating an experience of friction, conversation and repetition through mark-making process that involves repeated imagery and technique.

The project explores the idea of drawing through embodied responses to an embodied experience as lived. Junuka plays with the idea of temporality embedded in a lived experience and temporal expansion of the same in the response through drawings. Each drawing is like the previous one and yet unique as it is created without the conventional device such as a light box or a tracing paper. The repetition is driven by friction and dialogue with normative societal constructs of gender, its relation to materiality, comforts in assigned roles and certain routines. These routines in turn start to define oneself and the breathing body that senses the hierarchical structures of power. Hence each frame has a part of that feeling, aiding the process of transformation, and creating an experience of meaning-making. The small and big differences in each individual drawing make them worth both- a pause and a play of movement.

Biographies

Lydia Halcrow is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Bath Spa University, her practice-based PhD
was situated at the intersections between drawing, print, painting & installation investigating body and place through repetition. Her chapter ‘Tuning in: walking, slowing, sensing’ explores the interconnections between mark-making, place and repetition, in Art and Creativity in an Era of Ecocide (Bloomsbury). Her work is shown nationally & internationally.

www.lydiahalcrow.com
Instagram @lydiahalcrow

Meera Curam is a Visual Artist and Textile Designer, presently engaged in doctoral research at De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom. Her research delves into the Rangoli/Kolam tradition in South India for her PhD. Her focus is on its embodied knowledge, underlining the significance of Tangible and Intangible Heritage, and addressing the oversight regarding the intuitive complex mathematical sequences employed by women practitioners.

Junuka Deshpande’s primary interest is in the practice of observation. The practice inspires her to engage in the process of image making through drawing and mixed media images. She explores image making and image construction as sensemaking processes in her practice as an artist and an educator. Her professional journey as a film maker across forests, islands, cities and villages has led her to question implicit notions of self and hierarchy embedded in creative-perceptive processes. She is engaged in exploring methods of drawing and image making to understand outer and inner world. Junuka teaches at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and technology in Bangalore and works on projects that engage with place- based pedagogy.

Rachel Gadsden-Hayton is an artist, researcher and disability culture activist who exhibits her work internationally, with the object being to develop cross-cultural dialogues considering notions of humanity. She was the guest artist for the ‘Big Draw Netherlands Festival’ 2023 and presented TransHuman at the Museum Arnhem, and Extrapol, Nijmegen.
Rachel was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from South Bank University, 2016.

www.rachelgadsden.com