I have had a captivation with technical drawing and graph paper for a number of years, as in a younger life I drew graphs for market analysis. Over the time I have been involved with Handshake, technical drawings through engineering has momentarily, at different points in time, come to the surface. My time spent collaborating with Helen is one of those points.

Working to constraints that both Helen and I have agreed to adhere to, has inevitably meant utilizing technical type drawings, something that I have felt lurching in the background of my practice waiting to take that leap of faith into a more apparent foreground, passively working their way through from my subconscious to my conscious state of mind. The distance between Helen, myself and our idea has created an area where a certain degree of the work needs to be communicated through imagery and calculations, making me now more aware of technical drawing and the articulation needed to transfer information through these. It is a challenge for me to do calculations as it is not ordinarily part of my process, even though I am attracted to them. My work is usually quite the opposite; spontaneous, material and experimentally driven through the act of doing.

It think it is merely a case of opposites attract. I like the idea of work that is made instinctively sitting parallel with mindful like drawings but that is not the case here. Creating calculated imagery is purely, at this point, a communication tool to inform collaboration. The importance of creating diagrams that communicate correctly takes a certain amount of knowledge that understands what is important and what isn’t. I found a page in a book, I recently acquired, that summed it up simply by stating that, for sufficient information to be available to construct the average component, several related views showing the front, sides, top/or bottom are required[1]. And goes on to illustrate how a single drawing from a certain perspective can allude to several different shapes.

This may all sound quite obvious, but I found in making images that were intended to communicate a construction, it is not as simple as it first appears and in hindsight, knowing the rudiments of technical drawing first would have been an advantage.

This of course isn’t the end-all of utilizing diagrammatic drawing. Contrary to my making process, I have had the components of my object laser cut – the outcome, once constructed, alluding to something handmade but at the same time industrial. I am intrigued now with how technical drawing will infiltrate into my work in the future.

[1] Oldridge, L. Basic Benchwork, Argus Books, London, 2000