The Death Drawings by Deborah Harty

Traci Kelly

The Death Drawings 2014 Dust: Fine dry particles and earthly remains Someone I love has stopped breathing, another close-‐one will imminently cease to draw. Breathing is involuntary and can persist longer than the will to live. Temporal matter has already begun to realign, as bodies devour themselves on the way to the transformative death event. Bodies shed throughout their lives and in cessation gradually return to universal carbon and dust. Unseen, unspoken, undone – they enter our lungs with the oxygen that feeds our hearts and drives our organs. Filtering through our flesh, the no-‐longer-‐to-‐be-‐seen abide with us as micro-‐materiality and as potential. Deborah Harty’s deep-‐black towering structure forms an imposing drawing. The obliterated paper of Passage is overcome with densely laid charcoal, yet stands monumental, announcing a text that is barely visible. The body must navigate light source and shift perspective, head tilt, slight shoulder lean, feet planted, in order for the unpunctuated curves of graphite script to appear as like fingerprint and universe. In the making it has leaked from Harty’s nose and eyes, it has lived on the back of her throat and lodged beneath her nails. Seeking refuge in crevices of skin and garment, it is drawing at its most corporeal. If its discrete anchors were to break loose it may faint, and as in life and death, transition from the vertical to the horizontal. There is an even spacing of prominent folds and the retreat of valleys they construct... Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale… Cousin Ann’s ritual to finalise her ‘elsewhereness’ began with Martha and the Vandellas… Jimmy Mack when are you coming back? (A Tamla-‐Motown tune we loved as kids) and ended with Glen Campbell’s Honey Come Back. Refrain: All things must pass. Passage: A continuation of steps, a portion of text During the three-‐hour micro residency to research through my own practice and the prism of Harty’s work I began a continuation of movement between the

vertical and horizontal, between life and death. The relationship of the body to the gallery space and to its own gestures of relating and making are conditioned by and actively produce temporality. Time spent is situated and finite. In a previous reflection where my own work had been subject to seer-‐in-‐residence Joanne Lee, and in which she developed work around the planetary terrain of mark making, I noted that I was interested in carbon as a probing of something preform. Working in this context with charcoal and chalk, instinctively I use a scalpel to scrape the sticks, reducing their form, creating small mounds of particles. Lungs become important in locating and relocating intuitive responses where materials are reduced to micro-‐components, allowing drawings to be nomadic, shifting here, settling there. An intimacy between materials and artist is established. They respond to my movement, dance with my breath and gather as tangible whispers across the gallery floor. Refrain: All things continue. Charring and chalking Charcoal is made with an absence of air. It is buried. Heated and cut off from oxygen, impurities are consumed, volatile constituents removed. The remains have a radically different nature to their original materiality, which can never be overturned. The physical matter we previously knew is lost. Something else stands in its place, with the offer of new possibilities. Scraping the blade along the charcoal’s length produces a delicate plume of smoke-‐like drift. A wisp rising, reminiscent of an incinerator tower, curls into space like a spirit escaping. Small masking tape architectures begin to form and take on a life all their own. They cling to each other and like the husks of creatures sedimented into chalk, gather critical mass. The forms are sooted with released dense carbon particles. As gesture and action evolve in the drawing process they are prised from one position and located to another, revealing poignant outlined absences of the no longer. Other small mounds of charcoal dust are semi-‐reconstituted as my saliva drools into their heart, introducing my DNA, a foreign substance and strange contamination. Charcoal is therapeutic and when activated absorbs toxicity. Restoring balance it enables the corporeal body to continue. Chalk too denotes

the edges of bodies. Formed from skeletal remains its fossil debris dusts fingertips and scrapes to fine powder. It is discrete, with little attention drawn to the previous life forms as they enter the mortar of our architecture and are spread, like the gathering drawings on the ground, across our land as fertiliser. As I exhale the chalk drifts across the expanse of floor. It creates uneven edges that gather around a loss – a mourning and a longing. The drawings are barely there, barely breathing, but are rallied into life by a passing footstep and the opening of a door. With each breath I direct they stir and reform. They are transient, between this and that, here and there – a curious status on the cusp. Gradually, over time, the vacant centres of the fragile breath boundaries are temporarily occupied by other presences. Visitations of paper scrunched to skin-‐ textile, its nature also altered by the process, form loose vessels and sheddings. Moulded round the ball of my fist like a death mask, their delicate folds belie the punch beneath and become the final resting place of charcoal’s drifted ashes. Refrain: Life and death are material realities. Exiting Three hours pass quickly, yet I feel a level of exhaustion from the constant movement and attention to small things. I am spent. I contemplate pressure… It is the same elemental carbon when under extreme conditions that forms diamonds and prisms to marvel at. But for now I am not seeking the spectacular, I am looking for the muted, the barely there, shadows of the withdrawn. As I prepare to depart, the drawings reach the end of their physical life. They are swept and disposed off unceremoniously into a black refuse bag – a pauper’s grave. They continue to live on in the arrested moment of a photograph, in my memory and the passage of these words only. As the death drawings have unexpectedly emerged through inter-‐subjective research they will continue to haunt and inhabit future generations of output, taking their place in a genealogy. Refrain: I will recall them.