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 - in a slightly changing pace, at a rather leisurely pace, on foot and not on foot. Things turn, pass by, we overlook, overhear, pass over. There are fleeting moments. Unfetteredness helps in the perception of one's own complexity of action, which offers space to extend walking to drawing.

Drawing stretches sequences of walking, brings time and movement spaces into widening moments. It slows down and interrupts some movements, but does not necessarily make walking slower. It changes walking and also speeds up actions, brings about a personal grasp of things that combines and complements processes of drawing transmissions, interpretations, digressions, notations. Walking does not pause when drawing, even if we do not move from the spot for a moment. It finds its translation, its continuation: in walking with our senses in the environment and in walking with the pen on the page. What we draw does not have to become a usable motif, an objectification of experience. We don't even have to draw. Now, at this point, it is about drawing. It can become an articulation and experience of territory, of body and of place, perhaps a trace of all of these. In this context, walking becomes aesthetic action, practice of bodily experience and mental reflection. All of this has nothing to do with promises of happiness, wellness prospects, self-optimisation and coaching ideas, nor with scientification. Perhaps it nevertheless plays with research, or research with it. 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.

Ideas, experiences, concepts of group projects, art/cultural mediation and pedagogy can flow into the concepts of the workshops and courses. However, the joint actions do not become school-based courses and are fundamentally detached from fixed artistic or craft specifications and objectives. Drawing is an option. Programmatic, traditional teaching of techniques or fixations on the concept of art can be omitted. 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 starting and getting to know each other.