Peter Jap Lim

Walking and drawing

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Workshops, courses

with children, youths, adults

Images

We walk, stop, continue walking, orientate ourselves, search, look, listen, feel our way around - at a slightly changing pace, at a rather leisurely pace, on foot, not on foot. Things turn, pass by, we overlook, overhear, pass over. There are fleeting moments. Unfetteredness in perception simplifies action... complexity, which offers space to extend walking to the dimension of drawing.

Drawing stretches sequences of walking, brings time and movement spaces into widening moments. It slows down and interrupts movements, but does not necessarily have to make walking slower. It changes walking and speeds up actions, causes an additional grasp of things that combines and complements processes of graphic transmissions, interpretations, digressions, notations. Walking does not pause when drawing. It finds a translation, a continuation: in walking with our senses in the environment and in walking with the pencil - for example on a sheet of paper. What we draw doesn't have to become a usable motif, objectification, custody of experience. We don't even have to draw. Now, at this point, it is about drawing. It can become articulation and experience of areas, bodies, places, perhaps a trace of all of this. Walking becomes aesthetic action, practice of physical experience and mental reflection. Without promises of happiness, wellness prospects, self-optimisation and coaching ideas, scientification. Perhaps it nevertheless commits research, perhaps it is a poetic act.

Walking and drawing can be done alone. In a group, other impulses come into play. Conversations can have an effect on what is drawn and when. And also when there is no talking: Each group creates its own special influence on subjective reflections, on situational decision-making and experience. Drawing is an option, artistic techniques are too. Forgetting art and the concept of art here does not have to mean negating them, but can mean keeping them open, understanding proximity or access to art and its contexts as undefined, mobile, unbound. Potentials lie in the oscillation between actions, the criss-crossing transitions of walking, pausing, drawing, doodling and writing. It is their constant beginning and getting to know each other.
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