Against the View From Nowhere

Situated Drawing as an Ethics of Attention on the North Coast of Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article explores situated drawing as a method of attending to place, memory, and embodied knowledge through an artist-researcher practice developed along the north coast of Northern Ireland. Working through walking, observational drawing, annotation, photography and animation, it treats drawing not as a secondary record of place but as a way of thinking with it, asking what becomes visible when drawing is understood as a cartography of practice: not a neutral map viewed from above, but a relational tracing produced through movement, pause, encounter, affect and the layered social histories held in particular sites. 

Grounded in a practice shaped by personal and public memory, the article asks how drawing can register what conventional mapping often leaves aside: hesitation, residue, fragility, repetition, care, and the slow negotiations through which place is inhabited. Particular attention is given to coastal and edge environments. The meeting of sea and land is understood not simply as landscape but as a dynamic and unsettled threshold through which questions of boundary, belonging, and memory can be re-read. 

Rather than claiming mastery over site, the article argues for drawing as an ethics of attention. The drawn line is both aesthetic and methodological: a means of noticing, returning, and remaining with complexity. By positioning drawing as a form of cartographic practice, it contributes to discourse on situated knowledge, expanded drawing, and practice-based research, proposing that drawing can function as a critical and reflective method for engaging places marked by layered histories, unresolved tensions, and fragile forms of belonging.