Lapsing

Test edit, documentation of 91 bus journey, Sletta-Arna, 26th of August, 2023.

Part of this research has involved drawing as the starting point for a project called Lapsing, which I’m developing with Thorolf Thuestad for Neither Nor. We’ve now been lucky enough to receive commission funding for Lapsing, which will be staged in 2024. More on that in a later entry. For now, here are some of the sketches I’m working on at the moment.

Earlier this year, I began making pencil drawings while traveling on the 91 bus, allowing my eyes to walk a single line around a sheet of paper on my short trip around the edge of the fjord where I live. These images are a kind of folding of time and space into the frame of an A4 sheet. Like Ursula K. Le Guin's 'carrier bag' theory of fiction, the narrative line of the bus journey—the story of traveling from A to B—has been collapsed into an experience that can be contained within a single sheet of paper. Although highly energised, the images do not imply movement beyond the page. Doubling back on themselves, enveloping themselves within their own kinetic activity, they create domains in which, as in a maze or labyrinth, the eye can become entranced. The result can be something akin to a meditative state.

Reflecting on the documentation of my bus journeys as visual 'environments'—spaces within which the temporal experience of travels are contained—I’ve begun experimenting in my studio with 'drawing out' different spatial elements in the images. Through the use of coloured blocks and straight lines, I’ve begun constructing them as architectonic spaces—and thinking, in turn, about how these spaces might act as graphic musical scores. In particular, I’m interested in how these scores can be 'read', not left to right, but rather for the sense of motion as emotion that they contain—the affect of the images and 'mood' of the environment created by the additional lines and colours.