Drawing Out Hilbre
Tidal Event-Scores Between the Cartographic and the Choreographic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48619/bbds.v7i2.A1427Keywords:
Tidal Cartography, choreographic mapping, event-score, diagrammatic notation, more-than-human-attention, performative inscription, walking-as-method, drawing and moving imageAbstract
Drawing Out Hilbre is a practice-based enquiry on Hilbre Island where access is timed, ground is temporary, and orientation is continuously re-made through weather, tide, and group behaviour. Following Sarah Rubidge's (2012) proposition that movement generates dynamic systems that shape perception, I treat the crossing not as a route to be documented but as a space-producing force: the island seems to fill and empty, attention is pulled and re-pulled, and intensities accumulate where bodies cluster, disperse, hesitate, or reroute. Hilbre is a microcosm and complex nexus of relationships including eroding sandstone terrain, a Site of Special Scientific Interest. A site for a bird observatory and nature reserve complete with maritime Edgeland buildings empty and now occupied by BADA (British Art and Design Association) CASS, a Centre for arts, science and sustainability. I travel to a weather-beaten studio to study the movement ecologies of Hilbre. Yet while the buildings carry traces of past occupation and offer the seductive promise of a studio, it is Hilbre itself, with its shifting materials, tidal timings, and divergent lines of movement, that becomes the true studio, demanding sustained time, attention, and response.
The research proceeds through repeated site visits and iterative notation-making responsive to terrain, built form, weather, and co-present species. Instead of applying a pre-existing symbol system, I invent marks from observed and enacted dynamics: crossings, loops, pauses, detours, proximities, avoidances, and thresholds. These marks function as movement diagrams rather than conventional maps, registering not only where movement goes but how it composes attention in real time. It may include the specific movement of one species such as the Gull attacking the mussel or it maybe glare, seaweed drag, and wind dynamics. This creates a map that is distinct in time, space, and action: a glimpse of converging dynamics specific to this location.
Within my ongoing project blubilds, developed in dialogue with Leah's "diagrammatic stains," these diagrams operate as event-scores: temporal sequences translated into spatial configurations that retain abrasion, ambiguity, and excess as methodological value (Leah, 2022). The score is not the end-state. It is a launchpad: notation lifts off the page through close encounters with movement ecologies, becoming prompts for performance and action-based drawing, and extending into moving-image work through screendance's concern with inscription, choreography, and the legibility of the ephemeral (Rosenberg & Brannigan, 2013). Blubilds exist as serial drawings generated into action and back again through relay formations, they are never still but generative, processual and serial. In this context, processual means that drawing is understood as something that comes into being through an ongoing material process (Butler, 1999), rather than as the execution of a pre-existing idea. The work emerges through repeated contact between body, tool, surface, pressure, rhythm, attention, and matter. Joe Graham's Serial Drawing offers a theory of serial drawing as a plural yet unified art object, where meaning emerges through repetition, distribution, temporality and the relation between parts (Graham, 2021).
Blubilds are serial where the process unfolds through successive acts, marks, gestures, or iterations (Leah, 2022). Each drawing, line, or material encounter becomes part of a sequence, where small differences accumulate and reveal how distinctions are repeatedly made, undone, and remade.
Together, processual and serial suggest an approach to drawing where meaning is not fixed in advance, but produced through repeated bodily engagement with material forces. Each mark acts like a small agential cut: a temporary decision, separation, or registration within an entangled field of hand, tool, surface, and matter.
The work is situated within diagrammatic and performative approaches to inscription (Drucker, 2013), relational figuration and the diagram as a generative device (Zdebik, 2017), and recent diagram-led drawing discourse that frames abstraction as an analogical engine rather than a reduction (Drucker, 2013). Through this lens, "mapping beyond maps" emerges as a situated practice in which drawing acts simultaneously as research instrument and narrative device, inviting audiences to re-sense what persists together across tides, bodies, and species in a situated knowledge not limited to between humans and non-human species but material forces as well. Material forces can be understood both as the unruly, formless pressure of matter that resists fixed meaning, after Bois and Krauss (1997), and as Barad's (2007) agential entanglement of bodies, tools, and surfaces, together framing drawing as a situated bodily negotiation with matter.
Keywords
Tidal cartography; choreographic mapping; event-score; diagrammatic notation; more-than-human attention; performative inscription; walking-as-method; drawing and moving image.
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