Peter Jap Lim

Walking and drawing

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Workshops, courses

with children, youths, adults

Images

Walking and drawing

Walking, stopping, walking again – searching, observing, listening, feeling – in a subtly shifting rhythm. Things turn, pass by. Spaces dissolve, condense. A sense of ease in perception simplifies actions, offering opportunities to transition the act of walking from feet to hand to the dimensions of drawing.

A drawing combined with walking, which is also interpreted as a form of walking, allows for shifts between differently dimensioned spaces of movement: walks through physical spaces are complemented by strolls that extend seamlessly across the spatial dimensions of the environment and the linear and planar dimensions of drawing. In the act of grasping things, which connects with and complements the dimensions of graphic representation, interpretation, digressions, and notations, the temporal and spatial dimensions of walking acquire their own aspects, generating their own affects, emotions, and inspiration. Thus, walking does not pause during drawing, nor is it limited to it. It finds its translation, its continuation not only in the movement of the pen, but also in the further movement of the senses through the environment, a reflexive network.

Walking and drawing is an action that can be performed with minimal means, physical and mental reflection as a poetic practice.

Drawing is connected to drawing and walking, not to a drawing, a motif, an objectification, or an abstraction. Perhaps it is an articulation, perhaps a sign of an experience of regions, bodies, places, perhaps their trace.

Walking and drawing can be done well alone. Communities allow for the creation of their own spaces and their own impulses for subjective reflection, for situational decision-making and experience, for walking and drawing. Walking and drawing in groups enriches those equivalent walks alone.

Artistic techniques and concepts of art can be kept simple or open, or even negated. Proximity to or access to the arts and their contexts remain undefined, fluid, and unbound. Potential lies in the interplay between actions, the crisscrossing transitions of walking, pausing, drawing, observing, doodling, writing, and the continuous process of becoming familiar with them.