Research Paper | First Draft
I am keeping a section titled Research Paper separately, which will be where my work is formally submitted. I am keeping a copy here as part of my blog so I can refer back to this original submission as the text is modified and developed over the coming months. Submitted 29th May and as a google drive doc here.
Drawing as an Act of Kindness
Drawing as a gesture of kindness/compassion/empathy in the face of ecological grief: A comparison of the drawings of Gina Allen and Dryden Goodwin, specifically:
Left: ‘Vivacity’ (2020) by Gina Allen | 80x50cm dirt on canvas. Right: ‘Breathe’ (2022) by Dryden Goodwin | 1,300 drawings presented as 80 metre poster sequence, stills, animations and other public art.
Introduction
Drawing is the topic with a view to exploring the personal and social purpose of drawing as we face ecological/climate breakdown. This enquiry will examine ways in which expressions of kindness, compassion and empathy might communicate a shared experience of collective grief around climate disaster. More explicit definitions of the gradations of meaning between kindness, empathy and compassion will be examined more closely. I am interested in the humanity (humility?) around our response to climate chaos, specifically a collective sense of ecological as well as personal grief. I am interested in how drawing is well placed as an approach that is sustainable, democratic and has the potential to harness a universal sense of compassion and collective experience.
Methodology
The framework for this research will be both primary and secondary: there is a general, theoretical discussion to be had around what drawing is and how it may have a social purpose. Further analysis of what kindness is and how drawing relates to it will be explained and contextualised. Additionally primary research into the drawings and artists’ attitude towards drawing, empathy and grief will need to be established.
As both Gina Allen and Dryden Goodwin are based in the UK and contemporary artists so I hope to contact both with a view to conducting interviews. I intend to speak specifically to the question of how drawing as an act of kindness features in their work and the role of kindness in the social function of drawing to appeal to our basic humanness/humanity/humility. Questions will centre around several themes such as:
Choice and development of materials and their impact on engaging empathetic dialogue
Techniques, choices around expression
Source materials - approaches and strategies for understanding the subjects
Choices around scale and tensions between intimacy and the collective. It must be intimately understood but universal enough to be meaningful to a wider audience
Choices around public engagement - how the works have been displayed and the scale of their impact
In what ways do the works address the intersectionality of art and policy
How the artists feel kindness has influenced creation of the drawings and engagement with air pollution and clear air activism
In the case of Dryden Goodwin, an iteration of ‘Breathe’ is currently on show at Salisbury Cathedral as part of the ‘Our Earth’ exhibition until October 2024. It will be important to this research to visit this exhibition and obtain first hand impressions of the work. It would also be relevant to approach Gina Allen and/or the Ella Roberta Foundation to establish the location of ‘Vivacity’ and request a viewing of the original drawing. A possible interview with Ella Roberta’s mother, Rosamund, who has campaigned for Clean Air might become relevant to ascertain an alternative perspective on how drawings of her daughter might contribute to compassion in her fight for Ella’s Law, which petitions for clean air to be officially recognised as a human right.
Further interview opportunities may present themselves around Drawing as an Act of Kindness. A charity in Kent called People United have established an organisation around the Arts and Radical Kindness, which may offer insights to support this research paper.
NB: what is ‘Radical Kindness’? How is it different to kindness?
Discussion
I have chosen two artists for whom drawing, empathy and ecological breakdown are central themes with specific interest in air pollution.
Definitions of
drawing: what is drawing historically and in the context of contemporary art?
kindness, compassion and empathy - how are they separated, if at all and where are their gradations of meaning? Which is most relevant to this research paper or all of them?
ecological or climate breakdown? How does language influence the question?
ecological grief - grief in general and more specifically re climate
Gina Allen and ‘Vivacity’ - an introduction
Gina Allen is a contemporary drawing artist who created a series of drawings of Ella Roberta Kissi Adoo Debrah, who died at the age of 9 as a direct consequence of air pollution. She remains the only person to have air pollution cited as the cause of death on her death certificate. Allen extracted dirt from the wheels and exhaust of cars to create beautiful, delicate portraits of Ella during her lifetime. More broadly, Allen’s work considers how our work interacts with and impacts our environment with a view to using drawing as instrument of harnessing empathy and in turn turning attention to the social issues around Clean Air activism. Her choice of non-traditional drawing materials - extracted from the dirt from which she died - is a particularly touching gesture in the engagement of compassion in a drawing. There is a sense of intimacy in this drawing through its small scale and expression and the way in which the artist spent time with Ella Roberta’s family, reviewing and connecting deeply with her life and death. The role of storytelling is closely bound up in the sense of empathy the viewer feels with the subject - the choices in the image of a little girl innocently playing, ghostly reverberations, smoggy mark making are highly emotive. The drawing speaks largely to a sense of personal grief, the loss of a daughter and a sibling, a small life lost, however is also a symbol of a wider sense of collective grief. The drawing has become an image closely associated with petitions and ‘Ella’s Law’, as well as WHO BreatheLife clean air campaigns.
Dryer Goodwin and ‘Breathe’ - an introduction
Dryer Goodwin is a contemporary drawing artist who describes the empathetic gestures of drawing in his response to pollution with interest in part in the death of Ella Roberta but also many other subjects. The 1,300 drawings under the single title of ‘Breathe’ have been shown as stills, animations, projections and films. Additionally Goodwin has worked with 130 school children to create an ambitious animation of the drawings among many other socially engaged initiatives. There is a sense of enormity in the way these works are many, huge and very public facing. The drawings themselves are sensitive and lyrical but the way in which they are displayed feels louder and more collective than ‘Vivacity’. There is an element of storytelling in the drawings, particularly in those of Dryden’s son whose breathing rhythms were documented as part of this series but one sense the focus of these works is in the ways in which art and policy formation intersect. The concepts of breathing in the continuous present, breath as a noun and the verb ‘to breathe’, as well as the corollary of breathlessness are so generationally urgent as to be phenomenological: the drawings hold a space where the act of breathing becomes an act, or indeed an act of activism. The ‘Breathe’ series seem to speak more to a collective grief than a sense of personal loss, as is the case with ‘Vivacity’. The sites of exhibition include the Houses of Parliament and Lewisham Town Hall putting a political dimension into clear focus.
NB I am also interested in the work of Tacita Dean and Irene Kopelman within the parametres of this research question.