Drawings and Notes from Helston Folk Museum

On Friday 19th Oct I spent the morning drawing at Helston Folk Museum. I wanted to explore the way objects can carry a sense of narrative, time or trace. Whilst in the museum I became interested in the fragments of information the veiwer is told about an object. I liked not knowing much about an object - just a name and a date - it allows you to imagine, like a child's story book with the words missing and only the pictures remaining.

Whilst I was drawing a pair of battered miners boots I began thinking about the significance of mark-making. I began drawing them with a continuous line, thinking about the line representing a trace from the past to now. I also left parts of the drawing missing, and focused on certain details - I was thinking about the way memory works, we clearly remember some details from the past but forget others.

When I was drawing a group of dresses in the museum an elderly man began talking to me. Afterwards I noted down from memory fragments of our conversation. It seemed to add to a sense of narrative linked to my time spent there.

drawings and notes from my sketchbooks

The quote from Merleau Ponty made me think about making links to drawings and notes in my sketchbooks. In my sketchbooks I am interested in drawing everyday objects, people and places, noticing the extraordinary in the ordinary. I feel these notes and images begin to make links to ideas of phenomenology, perception, time, ways of being in the world, the idea of objects being more than just an object...

Initial notes about quote

These notes have been scanned from my notebook, and were written on Wed 10th Oct having just been set our brief to begin a blog and choose a quote to explore further. They are my first initial thoughts and ideas in response to reading the quote by Merleau Ponty.

Initial thoughts about quotes

This is the quote I have decided to make an initial response to:

'I see the next-door house from a certain angle, but it would be seen diferently from the right bank of the Seine, or from the inside, or again from an aeroplane: the house is none of these appearances...But what do these words mean? Is not to see always to see from somewhere? To say that the house itself is seen from nowhere is surely to say that it is invisible?...The house itself is not the house from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere. The completed object is translucent, being shot through from all by an infinite number of present scrutinies which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden.' (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 1962)