Simon Ringe

Without Within presents artworks that considers how the void, the without, might be creatively explored from within. The show begins with an installation ‘Fog Box’ that obscures the expected clarity of a shop window, and continues with gestured autographic body drawings, short films and includes live performances at the opening and close of the exhibition. The works make evident the adrift sense of ‘lostness’ and the turbulent confusion of the unknown through the seeming manifestation of barriers. The show considers how space is activated and considered from within via restrictive and limiting strategies. In that regard the void, as a place of unknowing, establishes the interior subjective self, the within, in relation to the illusory without.

My practice-based research, with reference to Levinas’s proposition ‘il y a’, has focused on my attempting to experience the void - the presence of absence, the outside, from a within regarding a without - as an attempt to know the unknown. The practice has developed into a series of large body drawings, executed on the floor, that records as traces both my circumnavigating the space of the paper and my experience. In this regard the research has devised and employed strategies to, in Susan Sontag’s words, ‘take forays into and take up positions on the frontiers of consciousness… and [report]ing back what’s there’ (1967). This paper presents works derived from employing my body as a drawing tool which is constrained whilst simultaneously being challenged to operate against the same self-imposed restriction. The seeming disparity of this strategy has afforded me the opportunity, I will offer, to not only directly experience the unknown, as an equivalent to the void, but has also allowed me to document an encounter with the other (in the Levinasian sense). The irremissable facticity of existence or horror, expressed in Levinas’ ‘il y a’, as an attempt to articulate the outside, elicits a pressing present absence that consequently precludes language as a viable communicative tool for and of corporeal alterity. Accordingly, it ‘is the experience of consciousness without a subject’ (Critchley, S. 1993), that my research attempts to articulate through visual means. The latest outcomes of my practice-based research have made evident internal non-representational experiences as attempts to know the unknown through drawing, as traces, with the body. In and through the activity of drawing, what cannot be drawn is revealed, in attempts to make effable the ineffable.

My practice-based research, with reference to Levinas’s proposition ‘il y a’, employed as an expression of the void as the irremissable and pressing facticity of existence, has focused my exploration on such an indefinable place of not knowing. This paper addresses artworks / research enquiries that transitioned from a ‘without’ perspective that shifted to become orchestrated from a ‘within’ position. The research practice grew from my attempts to visually articulate the unpresentable void, to problematically make effable the ineffable, which perilously drew me in, negating the safe distance of my previously intended observational position. The paper will examine the initial evolution of my practice based research that developed through a series of forays as approaches that operated with respect to Bollnow’s ‘cavity of space theory’. The illusory conceit of indefineable space being contained within a cavity, or indeed an image, though contradictory, conveniently affords the apparent external, objective chartering of space from without. Such a relative objective and safe position proved insufficient in realising the unknown. Positioning myself within the fog or cloud of unknowing (Daimisch, 2002) became the revised strategy for me ‘as a continuing learner’ (Fortnum, 2013) to diretly encounter the unknown. One of the roles of art, as Susan Sontag expressed it, is to ‘take forays into and take up positions on the frontiers of consciousness… and report(ing) back what’s there’ (1967). Similarly, Ryan Gander in conversation with Rebecca Fortnum on making art said, ‘It has to take you to a place you don’t know, somewhere that scares you’ (On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013). The consequent outcomes of my practice-based research have made evident internal non-representational experiences as attempts to visually articulate the unknown through drawing. In and through the activity of drawing surface and depth interplay continually in which the unknown elusively hovers for consideration.

This paper will consider drawings from my practice-based research as articulations towards understanding with respect to Whitehead’s prehension. The presentation proposes that drawing, as a tangible trace and route to understanding, is a viable tool to record one’s inexpressible embodied relationship in and with the world. The creative activity of my research endeavours to interrogate and visually articulate not knowing as an embodied experience from an internal subjective position. Reference to Whitehead’s prehension, which operates as an internal grasping for and at knowledge that he defined as “uncognitive apprehension” (1925), proffers that experience, as a route to understanding is felt. In that regard my journeys into the unknown can be seen to be “experience[s] of consciousness without a subject” (Critchley, S. 1993), that constitutes what my research attempts to explore. The presentation will also refer to how body recognition and regulation, as an intrinsically somatically learnt and embodied activity, is pivotal in human development (Lloyd, S. 2016, 2020). Reference will also be made to drawing workshops that I have provided to students. The outcomes of my practice-based research attempts to visually articulate the unknown through drawing, making internal non-representational experiences manifest.