Drawing Water : Drawing as a Mechanism for Exploration
- Submitting institution
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University of Dundee
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 52398000
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Fruitmarket Gallery
- ISBN
- 9781908612250
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The book ‘Drawing Water: Drawing as a Mechanism for Exploration’ represents two years of sustained creative research. Kovats cast a wide net into the collective visual record, accessing archives and collections of drawings, selecting a range to analysis and bring into a unique conversation with each other. The drawings represent a complex and extended creative investigation into different historical time periods, including the contemporary, addressing various specialisms and disciplines around her chosen thematic addressing our cultural, geopolitical and psychological relationships with the sea. The widely disseminated publication demonstrates Kovats’ advocacy for drawing as a cross-disciplinary tool of exploration and thinking.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Drawing Water: Drawing as a mechanism for Exploration is a publication of selected cross-disciplinary, pan-historical, and contemporary drawings, that take the reader on a visually-led journey (published by The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2014). Kovat’s proposition is that drawing visualises the way we think, revealing traces of our collective and personal explorations and histories. Drawings contained in the book are linked thematically by the sea, and the sense that in making the drawing, the maker is searching for something. Kovats emphasises this in her accompanying written analysis of the drawings and drawing process. The publication represents her thesis that drawings tell stories, and can speak to each other across disciplines and historical or cultural boundaries.
Kovats examines the ongoing influence of maritime culture; the primordial, oceanic, relational response to water; as well as socio-political implications of how we visualise and map the world’s seas. Drawing as a verb, meaning ‘to bring forth’, as in water from a well, is an underlying construct informing this writing. The deeply intuitive, emotionally charged, even biological, pre-verbal response to water that most living creatures share is the origin of resonance for these images and this research.
Drawing Water is part of Kovat’s ongoing creative research concerned with making a synthesised poetic, embodied, psychological, geopolitical and environmental exploration of our relationship with the world’s seas and oceans.
The publication has been widely disseminated, with Kovats presenting her research on numerous occasions, including keynote lectures (Henry Moore Institute; The Courtauld), public broadcasting (BBC Radio 4), and drawing symposia (Drawing NE; Trinity Buoy Wharf Prize Panel). Drawing Water has continued to shape Kovats’ continuing research and outputs with additional research links, artworks, exhibitions, and public facing events, with an increasingly emphasis on how art can address the environmental imperatives of our relationship with the world’s seas and oceans.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -