Guest editor – James Bowen 

Deadline – 31st January 2025

Submission: https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/TRACEY/about/submissions

This edition seeks to question the primacy of vision through explorations of trace-making beyond the optic or graphic mark. To explore drawing beyond the visible is as much a call to acknowledge drawing as having the capacity to exceed or escape itself—to be more than. The fundamentality of a drawing act is perhaps expressed through its engendering a sense of immediacy; of a gesture, becoming mark, becoming trace. Here, questions around binaries of presence and absence, subject and object, and permanence and impermanence have proved pertinent to the ongoing debates in drawing that seek to navigate its richly ambiguous terrain. Yet to make a graphic mark is also to make a sound and to engage with sensation, thought, and matter beyond the optic. 

In drawing, connections are made between divisible surfaces, relations are engendered. Rather than being isolated, these surfaces exist in relation to their milieus. In this way relations propagate and disseminate outwards. Simultaneously relations are brought inwards, what is exterior and separable to the drawing act is interiorised; the milieu makes its way onto the page. To draw is to make contact, to touch and be touched in and out of the act. Like drawing, sound transgresses. Vibration can pass through a surface as much as be reflected by it. Sound can be considered an ‘object’ yet one that endures only in its passing. An object or ‘thing’ but also an event—much like drawing itself (Newman, 2003; 105).  If the senses of sight and audition share a commonality, it is perhaps how they both act haptically. That is, as modes of touch. To look is to touch and be touched at a distance; to listen is to realise the intimacy of the far away (Bonnet, 2016; 142). 

By acknowledging the excesses in drawing this edition seeks investigations that engage in the apprehension of trace-making across senses. By doing so we ask what might other academic fields such as sound studies, cognitive science and psychology, and philosophy offer drawing, and how might this enliven critical debates into what it means to draw? 

Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• In what ways can drawing be used as means of exploring sound beyond its visualisation?
• How might collaborative practice be used to explore non-graphic trace-making in drawing? And how can techniques, processes, and ideas be shared across academic fields and used to generate further knowledge? 
• How might the ephemerality and inherent relationality of sensation be used to explore the spatio-temporal nature of drawing?
• How can sensation be considered a drawing? And how can this be used as a means of practice-based/led research?
• In what ways can drawing be used to explore and enrich ontological debates in sound studies such as phenomenological and/or material vibrational definitions of sound?
• How can non-graphic traces be used to explore identity and difference, be that social, political, material, and/or metaphysical? 
• How can digital and/or analogue technologies be used as a process of non-graphic trace-making? 

Responses are sought from outside and on the fringes of the arts – all rigorous research related to drawing or the ideas mentioned above, whatever your field, will be warmly welcomed.

TRACEY would like to invite the following submissions in response to the theme:

Full academic papers between 4500 –6000 words to be submitted through TRACEY’s online submission portal: https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/TRACEY/about/submissions Please note, as we have updated the submission portal, even if you have previously submitted a paper to TRACEY, you will need to register for an account to be able to make a submission.

Please ensure that you use the template for your submission, which can be downloaded from the submissions link above.

Deadline for all submissions: 31st January 2025

Please include the following information for papers:

Author(s)

Institutional Affiliation (if appropriate)

50-word biography