Drawing on a dream

DRAWING OUT 2012 Paper Title: Drawing on a Dream Author: Lynn Imperatore Affiliations: • PhD Researcher/University of the West of England/Department of Art & Design, ACE • Co-Chair, HATCH Research Project,PLaCE Research Centre, UWE • Research Student Member, PLaCE Research Centre, UWE Abstract This paper considers possible entries into precincts of imagination and imaginative activity - through a consideration of drawing practice as method for thinking about and around alterations of and away from ordinary consciousness, particularly sleep. Drawing interrogates assumed beliefs - apparitions of unassailable reality - by distilling these into abstracted component parts. The observant draughtsman cultivates an ability to withhold aspects of cognition and recognition from perception, therefore purposely refusing to find conclusion in preconception. New views, re-presentations, accidental revelation (from the unconscious and the unintentional) lead to novel an expanded knowledges. Drawing and sleep engage commonality as practices or habits that provide opportunity to discern qualities of the mysterious embedded within the ordinary. Central to this study is a shared visual language and sleight-of-hand in drawing and dreaming - imaginative activities that can generate (impossible) imagery, and lead us to a richer apprehension of interior life. Drawing and dreaming are magical manifestations - with hints of broader imaginative territories just over the edge of the page or slipping off into slumber. Work of select contemporary artists - including William Kentridge, Antonio Lopez-Garcia, Louise Bourgeois - are located and viewed in their practice relationships to creative predecessors of the devotional heyday of the European Renaissance. Artists - particularly in acts of drawing - still strive to give visual depictions of that which we know - but can never actually see. Conference & Publication Theme Drawing and Notation. Drawing as a sometimes intuitive other times driven by convention means of mapping appearance and movement . With special reference to innovative methods of notation Drawing: recording and discovery. Drawing as a speculative activity and means of transferring information