BBDS - Black Book: Drawing and Sketching
Black Book: Drawing and Sketching (BBDS) is a peer-reviewed journal publishing original research on drawing and sketching as cognitive, creative, and applied practices. The journal addresses the epistemological, methodological, and communicative functions of graphic mark-making across disciplines, including architecture, design, fine arts, and cognitive sciences. It focuses on the intersections between drawing practices and knowledge production, examining how graphic thinking operates as a mode of inquiry, documentation, and critical reflection. BBDS welcomes research articles, essays, and image-led works where visual material—such as architectural drawings, field sketches, or diagrams—constitutes a primary research output. The journal supports submissions that make a demonstrable contribution to the study of drawing and sketching as analytical instruments within their respective fields of application.
We invited contributions for Nature Drawing Nature, an online seminar co-organized by Pedro Soares Neves, Black Books: Drawing and Sketching Online Journal in collaboration with Sara Schneckloth and Kiera O’Toole. The seminar took place on April 3rd and 4th, 2025. We invited contributions that explore the interconnectedness of humans and nature through the lens of drawing. As part of nature, everything we create—every line, every mark—emerges from and interacts with the environment. This theme emphasizes drawing as a tool for reflection, care, and awareness, urging us to consider the impact of our actions on the delicate balance of ecosystems. Inspired by ideas of biodiversity preservation as gestures of hope and responsibility, and considering drawing as an ecological act, we sought papers that address drawing as both a creative and ethical practice.
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Ford is an attempt to record every organism that grows on a grave. I use a combination of observational drawing with quadrat data collection to direct the viewers eye to what I want them to notice in the form of a four-panel etching. The grave itself is a family plot in Ford Roman Catholic Cemetery, Bootle. There are 5 bodies within and countless growing from them. While drawing I try to take notice of each leaf, distinguishing each organism as unique but interconnected. Acknowledging the smallest details and lifeforms as worthy of attention. Noticing these details is a choice, every mark I record is a choice. Looking and drawing are not a passive process, you engage in a dialogue with the subject, trying to see and record as much as you can. Similarly, prayer is not passive, you meditate on the spiritual concerns you have. ‘Ford’ is a communion with the life that is sustained by the grave. I am influenced by a Catholic upbringing and the bodies in the grave were also Catholic. Catholic’s say masses for the dead to ease their souls through the afterlife, because of this the soul still exists in the collective consciousness of the parish and of those who knew them. The drawing, printing, and etching of the four-panels took 2 years, a period where I lived with the grave, drawing each day echoing a routine of evening prayer. The memory of those in the grave exist with me while I draw it and continue with every viewing of the prints.
This presentation explores the notion of drawing as a means of recording the ‘spatialised feelings’ of everyday public spaces, aiming to enhance our awareness of pathically felt bodily experiences. Drawing upon the theory of new phenomenology, the research examines how the affective and expressive qualities of atmospheres, understood as corporeally felt impulses, influence the gestural drawing process. Focusing on sites in Ireland and Germany, the drawings, termed 'Affective Cartographies’, are records of the phenomenological experience of site’s atmosphere.Through this practice-based approach, the gestural line becomes a form of pathic knowing, revealing dimensions that are more felt than thought. This approach offers a deeper lived experience by encouraging us to sense ourselves pathically within our surroundings. The paper expands on how drawing, as an phenomenological act, can provide a meaningful account of what is usually perceived as 'in-situ', 'background' or 'environment.' By prioritising the felt body, this method of enquiry extends beyond the traditional five senses, offering a more holistic understanding of the spaces we inhabit and the act of drawing itself.
In summer 2024 I produced a series of drawings on paper that explored aspects of the large island of Crete, and that end of the Mediterranean world as a chaotic system characterized on all levels – physical and metaphysical -- as a kind of knotting. Based on observations and sketches of the sea and wildlife around Crete, specifically the intensity of germination and growth visible in those cold waters, I entangled words and pictures. The drawings and the texts are below. The paper presentation comprises a viewing of the work as an exercise in ekphrasis.
The work described in this article is part of a current doctoral research project which builds on a framework of slow aesthetics theory, and draws upon theories of atmosphere along with interdisciplinary research from the social sciences on the restorative potency of wild nature. In this article and in the broader project, a practice-based methodology foregrounding repetitive mark-making, embodied gestural drawing, and reflexive practice records temporal, spatial and somaesthetic encounters with wild nature (ocean), and within the drawing process, producing states of slowness that are evidenced in the drawings. These in turn invite close attention in slow viewing encounters. Drawing is thus offered as a mindful, timeful and generative slow practice. This article positions water as a conceptual frame for slowness; the ocean as an affective atmosphere conducive to slow experience; and drawing water as a generative environment for slow art practice. This is explored through analysis of the ideation sites, methods and outcomes of a series of small water drawings made with the digital drawing media of iPad and iPencil. Praxis demonstrates attunement to watery atmospheres in nature as slow aesthetic experiences that propagate creative ideation. The drawing process then manifests, mediates and remakes these experiences, with a sensitivity to conceptual, methodological and material influences. The Water Drawings that emerge are understood both as containers for these experiences and as slow art objects.
This project is a collaboration with living honeybees resulting in large works on paper. Each artwork is a life size unique photogram made in the sun (not from a digital negative). These drawings were made using organic components, salt, earth, plastic and the presence of living honeybees and documented via the cyanotype process. The resulting “blueprint” is a record of light, time and labor; in an atmosphere of vast uncertainty. In the fleeting moments that pass during exposure, bees move and vibrate. Their presence is recorded over long exposures. Honeybees are in no way harmed by this project. This project is greatly informed by professional beekeepers. The Honeybee Blueprint Project explores invisible labor and a changing planet.
This article explores how drawing, understood through Indigenous Andean epistemologies, can function as a relational and ecological practice of situated knowledge. Moving beyond the Western tradition of landscape drawing as visual capture, the article frames drawing as an embodied, metabolic process grounded in the Aymara concept of amuyt’aña — a form of thinking-feeling that unfolds through the lungs, heart, and liver, where breath, blood, and nutrients link the body directly to land and cosmos. Within this framework, the landscape does not exist as an external scene to be framed or possessed, but as a relational field that flows through and shapes the body itself. Through Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s ‘ch’ixi’ concept, which holds contradictory Indigenous and colonial epistemologies together without resolution, the article examines how drawing can embrace and reveal the tensions between extractive mapping, environmental degradation, and ancestral care practices. The practice of drawing — using both local earth pigments and digital layers — traces the conflicting lines of ecological violence, political struggle, and spiritual care that converge in the contested landscapes of the Atacama Desert. Drawing, in this sense, becomes both a practice of relational attunement and a gesture of care. It resists the desire to simplify or fix landscapes into stable representations, instead holding space for the living, breathing entanglements between bodies, land, and memory. Ultimately, the article argues for drawing as a process of staying with landscapes in transformation, aligning body, breath, and hand with their fragile, ongoing becoming.
Counter-mapping Big Data and species precarity through drawing
Drawing has a particular creative capacity to hold and communicate complex ideas, through the visual and the performative. The gestural acts of marking coalesce with information and research as well as speculations, provocations, propositions, and ideas that are cultural and political. In my work I explore how drawing, as a practice of investigation and learning is a mode for commentary and dissemination on Big Data and species extinction that differs from the didactic nature of technoscientific research reporting. Mapping Extinction is a collection of drawings that use different bodies of data to counter-map species loss across global contexts: The impacts of the Australian bushfires in 2019-2020 on native biodiversity loss and the ongoing impacts of land clearing and development in the United Kingdom, on native wildlife. My experimental approach critically extracts Big Data statistics on extinction and counter-maps the vulnerability of species lesser known by the public to accentuate the plight of 'minor figures' of British and Australian native wildlife, including insects, reptiles, molluscs and small mammals. Mapping Extinction examinations multispecies civics and the cultural politics of extinction.
I am very interested in how deceptively simple drawings can act as catalysts for change. My drawings seem to have evolved with a stylised simplicity that seem to resonate with people in a way that is difficult to describe. I haven’t really tried to articulate this process before so it could be interesting to explore this as part of this drawing symposium.
Technoid Realism - drawing against nature?
Technical drawing is coextensive with the global propagation of capitalism, both historically and in its global reach. It is the imaginary subtext of the industrial revolution and must be seen as the dominant aesthetic of the world‘s productive forces. Hardly anything exists today that has not passed through the stage of being drawn in the format of the technical drawing. Considering the ideological underpinnings of these productive forces towards nature, either through what Marx called the „metabolic rift“ in the sense of an alienation from nature, or simply in the face of capitalism‘s death drive towards endless profit and the resulting ecologically catastrophic futures, it seems necessary to ask: can there be another drawing? Should it replace the technical drawing? Can we overcome it? Would another drawing have to enter the contested arena of truth and effect? Or would it refrain from doing so? Is drawing, as opposed to its „technical“ doppelganger, an appropriate lever to challenge the hegemonic ideological configuration that produces our alienation from nature? Technoid Realism is a conceptual framework for analysing and framing technical drawing beyond the feigned ignorance inscribed in the ideological landscape of capitalism. Can this framework help to define a different kind of drawing? If so, it must certainly reconceptualise its relationship to nature and our embeddedness in it, as well as its concept of technology as a mediating force.