Voice as a tool for drawing

This thesis is a practice-based investigation into the use of voice as a tool for drawing. I explore a series of vocalisation acts through a range of technologies and environments to ask: how can voice be used as a tool for drawing? This research question is underpinned by a hypothesis that by investigating voice as a drawing tool the ambiguity inherent in drawing can be problematised further through the instability and potential of voice in its contingent non-graphic traces. As a result, this thesis contributes to knowledge in the expanded field of contemporary fine art drawing. This thesis refers to artists and researchers in this field including but not limited to Deborah Harty, Robert Luzar, Mary-Clare Foá, Kendal Heyes, Carali McCall, Sophie Tottie, Joe Graham, James Elkins, Marina Kassianidou, and Catherine de Zegher.

As a practice-based investigation, this research utilises a hybrid methodology of action research (Kemmis, McTaggart, 2008), reflection-in-action (Schön, 2007), and the integration of theory and practice as action (Cazeaux, 2006, 2017) wherein practice outcomes are reflected on, both in the act of making and through the process of theoretical research. This cyclical process has involved theoretical and practical research being treated as operating in reciprocity and has resulted in practice outcomes that function in serial development with each outcome being the consequence of a change being introduced to the cycle that then feeds further research. In this way practice outcomes, rather than being solutions to research questions, have operated to problematise speculative research questions in their development (Drummond, Themessl-Huber, 2007).

This research makes an original contribution to knowledge in the expanded field of drawing in contemporary art by proposing that voice can be used as a tool for drawing. Through this research I explore the capacities of materials and recording and playback technologies to both carry voice as vibration and to mark it in their mediation. By doing so this thesis questions the centring of human authorship in the creation of drawings (Petherbridge, 2010). I argue that the movement of voice is mediated by the materials and technologies through which it vibrates and transduces. These non-graphic traces are pluralised and contingent, and while being effects of the human body in the act of voicing and listening, cannot be reduced to the body alone.