Sound as Form / PERCUSSIVE DRAWING

Exhibition Essay

SOUND-DRAWING

A deep and rumbling sound reverberates around the space. It starts low, quickly grows, peaks and then hangs in the air. The percussionist sits with her mallet poised, waiting in the negative space of the extended silence. Then again - strike - another deep reverberation sounds out around the gallery. The audience sit, some with eyes closed, watching forms appear in their minds-eye and feeling the vibrations as the sounds wash over them.

SOUND AS FORM / Percussive Drawing is a performance by percussionist Saskia Shearer and visual artist Belinda Yee. The performers use traditional instruments like the Gangsa (Indonesian gamelan instrument), Shimedaiko (Japanese drum), cymbals, snare drums and tom-toms alongside everyday sound-making objects such as chains, coins, pipes and tiles. This is not music and it is not a soundscape, the artists’ intention in this performance, is to draw with sound.

The proposition that sound could be used as a drawing medium depends on the way ‘drawing’ is defined. There are many possible ways drawing can be understood. Traditionally, to draw is to make a visual mark with a drawing tool, for example pen on paper, ink on parchment, ochre on stone or by using a cutting tool and scribing into a material. Since the 1960’s drawing has, like other art forms, been operating in an ‘expanded field,’ a term coined by theorist Rosalind Krauss who was initially referring to the way sculpture was extending beyond its traditional characteristics.(1) To understand sound as drawing requires first to expand what is meant by drawing. In its most basic form, drawing can be understood as lines in time. As Tim Ingold, anthropologist and enthusiast of lines describes it, “to live life is to lay down a line,” inferring that the simple act of moving forward, along an unknowable trajectory, is itself drawing.(2) In the same way, walking can be drawing, dancing can be drawing, the murmuration of birds can be drawing. In distilling drawing down to lines in time, the artists are moving from an ocular-centric idea of drawing to a broader experiential framework. To see sound as drawing is to understand a sequential experience of sounds as a trajectory or line with contrast, tone, duration and repetition. An auditory narrative that twists and turns, is interspersed with silence followed by crashing inflection points where sounds collide and at times trail off into a sweeping gestural forms.

SOUND AS FORM is visual art research in practice. The hope is that it reveals new insights and generates further questions. The hypothesis underpinning this research is that characteristics like repetition, tempo, tone, modulation, and duration are attributes of both percussive sound and drawing. The work explores whether the characteristics of these modalities loosely map, where volume, for example, might be visualised as the strength of a mark, tempo as the speed with which a line is drawn, and emotion marked out in the delicate trace of a curve or by soft meandering sounds. As research, it does not seek to define these relationships as much as to ask questions and explore potentialities.

In preparation for the performance, the artists came together for a four-day workshop to explore the way it feels to make and hear sound and the relationship of sound to mark-making. They identified sounds that lingered in the air while others spontaneously evaporated. Sounds that are translucent, enabling other sounds to be heard, and those that are opaque in that they cover and obscure. They immersed themselves in four different sound worlds; skin, metal, wood and stone, to investigate the types of drawings each might suggest. They explored silence, the primary component of any auditory composition, the glue between sounds, sound’s shadow. They considered how silence might be visualised and whether it mirrors the idea of negative space in drawing. They investigated whether some sounds could be used as a kind of eraser, opening up white space by bringing energy down after the impact of strong, loud, persistent sounds.

An important outcome of the workshop was the identification of language units. These are groups of sounds with similar characteristics, which became the building blocks of the subsequent sound-drawing. The language units seemed to naturally cluster, however, linking these to a particular set of marks was difficult. Yee and Shearer found they visualised sounds differently which prompts the question, can a basic, universal visual language of sound exist outside formalised systems of notation? The drawings created in the mind, in response to sounds, likely differ depending on a person’s life experience and familiarity with percussive sound and drawing.

There seems to be one fundamental difference between sound and drawing. Sound plays out over time, where a drawing exists fully formed in the instant of seeing. As cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky proposes, "[h]earing has to thread a serial path through time, while sight embraces … all at once." (3) While this understanding of visual cognition would suggest a fundamental inconsistency between visual art and sound, it does not account for the temporal nature of drawing. Drawing is understood as a temporal art because it is process oriented and it unfolds over time. (4) As a pen is pushed forward on a page, the leading edge is enmeshed with the present, a continuous and evolving ‘now-point.’ Because drawn lines tend to remain visible, this moment of making is one the viewer can relive, by "retracing the tried lines and textures of the drawer’s hand." (5) This contrasts with painting where the opaqueness of paint covers over and obscures the history of making.  As artist and lecturer, Dr Maryanne Coutts suggests, “time is what makes drawing drawing.” (6) Drawing is created in time, it embodies time and for the viewer, it also plays out over time.

Historically, artists have explored the relationship of drawing to sound in different ways. Some creating graphic notations to visualise music, for example, Iannis Xenakis, John Cage and Morton Feldman from the 1950s and 60s. Others drawing to capture the sense of a musical composition or performance, famous Modernist examples include Mondrian, Kandinsky, Matisse and Klee. In contrast, musicians have also made music from paintings. Composer Alvin Lucier, for example, made Wave Songs, For Female Voice with Pure Wave Oscillators (1998), from the waves in artist Lee Lozano's Wave Series (1967-70) paintings. In Lucier’s composition, "the drawn line was used to generate sound, making the graphic trace audible." (7) In more contemporary terms, there is the recent performance MAGIC SAUCE, by Locust Jones and Tim Bruniges to launch DRAW Space, a new artist-run gallery focused on experimental drawing. In this work, Bruniges’ drumming provided the driving energy and auditory texture for Jones’ durational drawing performance, movement and vocalisations. Other Sydney-based artists, Jody Graham and Mark Cauvin, draw and play music simultaneously, creating an exciting interplay between drawer and musician. This work, SOUND AS FORM / Percussive Drawing, is different because it involves the audience as collaborators. By creating a space in which the audience can visualise the sounds in their minds-eye or experience them as vibration, the artists’ are collaborating with the audience in the completion of the work. These works, MAGIC SAUCE, SOUND AS FORM and the upcoming work by Graham and Cauvin are the first three performances in a series of ‘sound-drawing’ experiences programmed for DRAW Space in 2023/4.

In this performance, SOUND AS FORM / Percussive Drawing, the artists attempt to tease apart how we think about drawing, avoiding the ocular-centric nature of mark making and visual art more generally, by using sound as the drawing medium. They invite the audience to explore drawing as a sequence of experiences in time, be that vibrations, shapes or as visualisations of colour and form in the minds-eye, in which-ever way they choose to respond to the improvised sound-drawing washing over them.

1. Krauss, Rosalind. "Sculpture in the expanded field." October 8 (1979): 31-44.

2. Ingold, Tim. The life of lines. Routledge, 2015.

3. Clynes, Manfred, ed. Music, mind, and brain: The neuropsychology of music. Springer Science & Business Media, 2013.

4. Fay, B. What is Drawing - A Continuous Incompleteness, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2013.

5. Zegher, M. Catherine De, Newman, Avis, Tate Gallery, Drawing Center, Tate Britain, and Tate Modern. The Stage of Drawing : Gesture and Act : Selected from the Tate Collection. London : New York: Tate ; The Drawing Center, 2003, pg 274.

6. Private discussion with the author, early in 2022.

7. Lovatt, Anna. "Wavelength: On Drawing and Sound in the Work of Trisha Donnelly." Tate Papers 18, (2012).

Belinda Yee