Drawing Place: A Talk with Drawing Projects UK

What a pleasure it was to be invited by Anita Taylor of Drawing Projects UK and The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize to take part in an online discussion about drawing place, alongside fellow shortlistee Peter Sutton. The video of the talk, including Peter Sutton’s wonderful talk too, will appear on the Drawing Projects UK soon. I’ll keep you posted.

The following is a transcript of that talk:

“Good evening everybody, I’m really delighted and grateful to be here tonight with Anita and Peter. Thank you for inviting me, Anita.

I am speaking to you from my studio at the end of my garden in Oxford, but I’d like to invite you to join me on an exploration of the wonderful island of Anglesey, a place rich with history, full of the remnants of past ages, fascinating landscapes (natural and manmade) and in particular an old railway line running 17 and a half miles from Gaerwen in the south, up through the middle of the island to the small harbour town of Amlwch on the north coast.  

I first encountered the line, during a family holiday to Anglesey in 2018, and since then it has exerted a powerful fascination for me, to the point that it became the subject of my recently completed MFA in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University. Exploration of landscape and industrial history is one of a number of personal interests that I have drawn into my art practise. I also find myself drawn to islands, too. I think it’s to do with that sense of marginality, escape and distancing from the centre; and I enjoy finding stories that are untold or overlooked, perhaps hiding in plain sight.

A little bit of history may be helpful to start with.

The line opened in the 1860s. It lost its passenger services during the “Beeching Cuts” of the 1960s, but freight trains continued to run up until 1992. Since then, it has fallen into disuse, but the tracks and infrastructure remain substantially in place, albeit subject to the passage of time and progressive reclamation by nature. A group of volunteers is now working to clear the line with a view to restoring it to use, advocating for its restoration as part of the current national debate about reopening old railway lines. It is a vibrant, sometimes fractious, debate. The line stands at a crossroads, or perhaps I should say a junction, right now because it has several different potential futures as well as a real sense of history to it.

So whilst on that family holiday in 2018, I was very intrigued see this old line meandering around the contours, settlements and lakes of Anglesey on maps at first, and then glimpsed on the landscape through trees and many weeds. I was struck by this idea that a map is just a snapshot or a representation of a place at a given moment in time. Maps don’t set out to record every  quality of a place, its atmosphere or history, or the ways in which places change over time -  that is not their purpose -  so I started to think about the railway line as existing in time too. It is, or was at the time of the drawing, 156 years old.

I started to think about the railway line as a drawing on a landscape and in time too. But I was always aware, from the very beginning, that my subject was an elusive one. Maps helped me to think about the obvious, literal quality of being a line that is inherent in a railway line , including on a map, and so it seemed to me that a drawing was the perfect way to think further about this.  I also wanted to think about the qualities of time, decay and endurance that I saw as important aspects of the place.

And really that is where the idea for “Timelines” originated.

It was completed in late 2019 and was one of my very first responses to the railway line. I made this drawing at home 200 miles away from Anglesey but this didn’t seem a problem to me because I was really thinking about those aspects of the line that are unseen and intangible.

To make the drawing, I had the idea to use the line’s mapped shape as a sort of motif and to use one line to represent one year in the life of the line from the beginnings of its construction in 1864 through to the present day. There is a strand in my work of the encoding and preserving of information, especially marginal information or information that is at risk of being lost or forgotten. I established a process for that too, a schematic plan on a spreadsheet so I could consistently and progressively move from softer to harder grades of pencil so that I could make the line become fainter as I worked left to right across the paper, to evoke a sense of a narrative of fading away or forgetting that is very apparent in the condition of the line today. I worked steadily ticking each line off on my plan as I went. And when I reached the line for the year 1992, when the trains stopped running, I swapped from a graphite pencil to a plastic stylus, so that I was making an even fainter mark; a trace, if you like, or a register of falling into stillness or silence, perhaps.

I should say also that the drawing is on tracing paper, which I chose for several reasons. Firstly, there was the purely practical reason that it allowed me to trace the line from the OS map. There is also something quite mundane or “low-status” about tracing paper. I felt that worked quite well for this rather unglamorous, overlooked railway line. But more than that, I really enjoy the way tracing paper responds to the pressure of a pencil tip by recording a clear indentation. It also has that quality of translucence, that captures or reflects light, in a different way to standard papers. This helps makes the multiple lines of this drawing create a visible sense of contour so that they appear to coalesce into their own sort of imagined landscape. Perhaps partly because we all recognise the convention of contour lines from maps, the eye reads the drawing as a having a topography of its own.  

Following on from this idea of topography and space, one of the reasons that drawing is so important in my practise is that it opens up a space for thinking, and I think that is true for many drawing artists. The drawing took about four hours so I had plenty of time for reflection as I worked. Thinking and making seem to go hand in hand when I’m drawing, and this was particularly the case for me with “Timelines”. The following are some examples of the thoughts that occurred to me as I worked:

• The idea of systems, regularity and repetition that is typical of a railway line – trains going along the line, tracing and retracing the fixed route of the railway lines. The process of creating this drawing became, I found, a way of enacting something similar by making my own journeys down the line, as a train would, and really helped connect me to it.

• This enabled me to connect to the idea of memory in the drawing – memory of the line and also the memory of my mark-making itself.

• This lead me to thinking about lines are recoding something: grooves on a record, or growth lines in stump of a felled tree, or sound waves which are of course other ways of storing and preserving information. So I found a sense of reverberation, resonance or echoes in the drawing, that made me think more about how the line was perhaps less silent and more resonant than I had first thought. (They could be geological or seismic movements, too – Anglesey is geologically very significant but that’s another story).

Thanks in large part to “Timelines”, all of these things were aspects of the railway line that I went on to explore in other work in the following year or more. I wasn’t consciously planning for these outcomes, but I discovered them in the process of thinking and making put together in the creation of this drawing. (I am a fan of the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who writes very powerfully in this area, as well as on the subject of lines.)

But I think the drawing also enabled me to connect deeply with what I saw as the qualities of this place that I was exploring – not, here, in the sense of a visual representation of what the railway looks like, (though I have done that in other work) but in a way that connected with my reaction to its intangible, felt and unseen qualities. And when I was able to physically be near or on the line (which of course turned out to be much harder to achieve in 2020 than I expected) I felt able to connect to the railway through the thinking I had done in “Timelines”. And importantly, the line had opened out, if you like, leaving the map and acquiring  a real and rich sense of place, resonance and interest.

If you are interested in finding out a little bit more about my work in response to the Amlwch railway line, please visit my website which is www.markrclay.co.uk There is a gallery there of a my wider body of work including this other drawings but I have also written quite extensively on aspects of the railway line, and my exploration of it, in the blog that is also on the site.

Thank you very much for listening.

Thoughts On Binding

The following is a documentation of some of the thinking and reflection that occurred during a new phase of making, as I continue to build a body of work on the theme of the (disused) Amlwch railway line, on Anglesey. It centres on my use of copper thread as a binding material.

What is binding about?

I think of acts of care, preservation (e.g. Egyptian mummification), of recording and remembrance. A way to “re-member”, as in to put something back together again. At the same time, I think of natural binding: of bindweed and ivy that slowly entwines the Amlwch railway line in a slow, relentless act of reclamation and transformation.

So there is tension here, between:

1. The binding of care and preservation, the human intention to create, to preserve and to restore, to bring dead things back to life, and;

2. The binding of capture, control, the natural intention to change, replace, evolve.  New life growing out of the death of the old.

Is it even possible to reconcile the two in a piece of work, to place them alongside each other as I think is happening on the railway? As Tim Ingold might say, perhaps the making will show me how, might show me how to think by making….

So I take a piece of old sleeper slice and turn it in my hands, The cut edges are ostensibly smooth but I can feel the lines in the surface, both radial and circumferential. There are cracks in the body and at the edges of the wood, some from the time of the growing, and some from the time of the dying (rotting). I continue to turn the wood block over and over and a way of making comes to me from this.

Taking up fine copper thread, I combine it with the process of turning over and over. I follow the edges and contours of the piece of wood until I have bound it, but not obscured it. It seems to me, as I work, that the act of binding expresses a desire to protect and to support this old wood. To stop it coming apart. To “re-member” it:

The process flows on and so my ideas flow on with it. I keep going, taking this further and do something similar for all the remaining fragments from this “end of the sleeper” slice. The copper thread seems also to imply a spirit of reconnection, or restoration, of the wood, to the point before time, decay, and my intervention split it apart.

This end piece of wood brings me in mind of my idea of a piece called “Terminus”. The end. I had previously imagined doing it with a much larger piece of old rotted sleeper, but the coronavirus lockdown prevents me searching for one on the Amlwch railway line itself.

I am not done with this. This idea keeps me, and perhaps by extension this decaying railway, in the present tense. I take up another sleeper slice. What if I worked more closely with the grain and the lines of the wood? Is this a way, even, to bind those two halves of my thoughts on binding together. (Pun absolutely intended.)

It changes the way I do the binding. Not a relatively random reflex as in the previous pieces, but a more considered, exploratory, mindful approach. I too am progressively bound up by the idea and the process. The thread encloses the wood and it encloses me. too, in this repetitive act of making and thinking.

One hour later:

It feels like a mapping (back to my starting point – the OS map of Anglesey), an exploration, a re-discovery even, of the nature of these materials. Not an exact one, but a halting, partial, cautious and even risky one (the thread breaks several times as it catches and stretches). As I wind around the edges, notches and grooves the tightened thread makes tiny, metallic “plink” sounds like the plucking of a harp string at the top of its range.  (I must record these.)

There. There it is. The idea of the “sounding of the line.”

I am so aware, by now, of the reflective and thoughtful nature of what I am now doing. It is slower, and more careful, too.  Perhaps even ritualistic: as in Ancient Egypt, with the mummification of dead pharaohs and their belongings, the act of binding (mummification) is an act of remembering and preserving things that are precious.

I think this railway is precious. And my acts of binding have enabled me to make that tangible.

Run The Line

I recently came across this wonderful film by runner and explorer Beau Miles. It’s called “Run The Line” and I really recommend that you take a look too.

As you may know, I too am exploring a railway line, but through my art rather than through running (though I am runner too, and you never know!) This beautiful film therefore struck a chord with me in lots of ways:

Beau explores a long-closed railway line in his home town in Australia. Unlike the Amlwch line, which I am studying, its track and infrastructure is largely gone and there is no hope of it making a comeback. Beau’s self-made one-man marathon is a fascinating and enjoyable journey through geography, history and the imagination; part run, part re-enactment, part day out.

Railway lines (both old, current and future) mean many different things to many different people. Yet I was very struck by how Beau’s film uncovered many themes and ideas which I recognise from my own research into the Amlwch line on Anglesey: the fragility of places and the resilience of memory; the human impulse to remember and its propensity to forget; the strange blend of the mundane and the poetic that old railway lines conjure up; and of course the amazing resilience of long distance runners. Thanks for a fascinating and enjoyable film, Beau!

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Railway journey drawings

The following article is an extract from an essay written by me in 2019, entitled ‘What does it mean to draw?’ Drawing on trains is something I have done for a while, partly to pass the time. It’s a fascinating and mindful way to experience a train journey in a different way. And a very good Way To Get Looks.

It amazes me how different they are each time I do one. This practice has developed further since these first attempts and I shall share more in the future. For me, drawing doesn’t have to be “of” something, or it could be “of” something you cannot see with the eye, as is the case here. I often think that drawing is most interesting when it is “about” something.

A short video of the process of drawing this piece on a moving train can be seen at: www.instagram.com/p/BrQvBfQDKtX/

“I am on a train, travelling to London, moving at speed through the Oxfordshire countryside. But today I am neither watching the world fly past the window nor admiring the winter sunshine on the hills. I am drawing something: something unseen.

(fig. 1) A Train Journey to London. 11 December 2018. Drawing and photograph by Mark Clay.

Slowly, I move my pen horizontally across the page, attempting to draw lines as straight and steady as possible. With only the nib of my pen touching the paper, this is not easy; a sort of physical challenge, even. The train, swaying over points and round corners, transfers energy through my body, altering my would-be-straight lines. They become jagged, with trembles, loops and kinks recording a memory of each motion, transferred from rail to paper, via carriage, body, arm, hand, and pen.

This drawing is made from, and by, all those things, just as a piece of piano music is not performed solely by a pianist’s fingers but by their whole body in conjunction with both conscious and unconscious mind. It is a record of a journey. It is itself a journey. Paul Klee took his line for a walk, but I am taking mine on a train ride.

At my destination the final, lurching halt of the train registers as a downward-upward spasm. I am thinking about the scientific rigour of a seismologist gathering data, rather than the experimental drawing of an artist gathering lines, so I conclude by drawing a few comparative lines after the train has come to a halt. My lines become much straighter, acting as a “control”, drawn without interference from the train’s motion.“

A Train Journey to London. 11 December 2018. Drawing and photograph by Mark Clay.