Owlpen Island Universe

A response to the final day of the coLAB BODY and PLACE residency

I’ve often shared a drawing, but across time and without consent, stealing from an existing image and departing on my own. Emptying the object of everything I can use. Taking liberties without permission. Appropriation. My whole creative life. Appropriation. This ‘shared drawing’, however, was a true collaboration. Two of us sharing the process and the outcome together. On a piece of paper large enough for two bodies to lie down on side by side. Paperchain women, holding hands but otherwise not touching. Bodies in place.

Before I met Amanda five days ago, I admired her. Her animation work is witty, and beautiful. As to this shared drawing shindig, I feared I would be the clot in her flow, that she would be better off without me. If that second statement is voiced in a film it’s followed by a closing door, followed by the sound of an engine starting outside, followed by interior silence. A sigh. An eye roll.

Do not read that script. Crumple it up. Chuck it.

The morning was spent researching our chosen area of the Owlpen estate. We found a round-the-back frontier space, full of resting tractors and abandoned non-perishables; a blue plastic turtle- shaped paddling pool, an empty skip, an isolated fan belt, a wall-less structure with a corrugated roof; wood and iron and curling vines. The decisive detail was a set of old office chairs. An unlikely waiting room. Sprung seats, square, heavy as lead. We dragged them to face the bucolic views. A huge looming matriarchal tree holding the sky up. A deep dark trough plunging downwards. A horizon line too close and too high. Foliage whipped up by rushing gushing air, full of pre-storm electricity and spores carrying the ingredients of life. The machine is plugged in. The tractors and fanbelt stay motionless. The treeline across the valley breaths in irregular waves.

We draw it all towards us. We draw it all. The dark and the light. The absence and the fullness. Nettles and ivy, and trunk and canopy and we curve with the sky. We draw the sound of our footsteps on the stones and mud, and the chunky grooves of giant wheel tread. We draw the dry, the damp, the distant mower hum. Drawing has been our third verb after sleeping and eating since we arrived on Monday and Martin told us that you can only draw the way you draw and then showed us that the way we draw is not immutable. The drawings I am now making I don’t recognise my hand in. I wonder if I am changed in other ways. Now I know that some bird song is triangular and some is elliptical. That if I imagine holding something heavy or round or dry or fluffy or smooth, the mark I make on the paper will tell it. If I can just stay with the sensation, suspend the memory, mute the brain babble.  

Amanda and I are exhausted but focused. I’m confused to find we missed a tea break. It’s been three hours. Skies darken. Bladders fill. We have more to draw but we return to the barn for green soup, white bread, blue cheese. A wee wee.

And then the rain arrives and the couple sized paper is taped to the floor.  

Perhaps the morning in the space had somehow psychically synched us.  At the start, a pause and a discussion (even telepathic people first need to establish the fact). And then a charcoal line. Her tree departs towards the sky so fast it’s like looking up from inside a well. I layer on some hard bark, some circling softness, a story of expanding outwards. We have begun. Whole arm spans of graphite wrap the wind. Smudgy pigeon chorus marks morph into mushrooms, the spheres of cow parsley hiding inside.  Flashes of bright sky between summer leaves like flapping bunting. Alchemy. A running dear appears. We know this hunted animal. A piercing scream through Wednesday dusk. Our smart and kind life model, Silvina, shows up. Her waist, her stride, her twisting spine. The drawing takes on more than we give it. A lumpy cartoon face bends around a trunk. From one side, the drawing is an ocean, a rip tide, a huge tipping wave. From another side it is the view from the mouth of a low-ceilinged badger set. The tree upends itself. Branches become roots sunk into thick dark mud. Chirping triangles flicker. Nothing is solid or still or reliable. The dawning horror of accidental time travel in the countryside. We joke we have drawn the whole cosmos from our tractor yard waiting room.

With warm thanks to Owlpen Manor and Claire Mander and theCOLAB. Particular thanks to Nina and Samuel Wisnia for their generous support, to Martin Morris and Karolina Glusiec for their excellent teaching, to Silvina Pierini for her strength in body and of mind. Shout out to the Owlpen Resident Artists ‘BODY and PLACE’ Class of 2024: Jessica Akerman, Amanda Bonaiuto, Claire Morgan, Stefan Tiburcio, Rewati Shahani, Weronica Siwiec, Carrie Stanley, Holly Stevenson and Sharyn Wortman. May we reunite soon and often, in the meantime, ‘viva bene’!