Phil Sawdon

Undrawn … Most Unbecoming … The Keeper’s Fiction

 

 

‘Have you seen any [small] brown birds?’

 

‘I have and each smirked and called … this is not the drawing … this is the exact imitation of one …’

 

The Fictional Museum of Drawing … drawn down drapes drafted into a transient space between ineffectual words. I wonder … should I linger until they are undrawn?

 

Meanwhile I bind [a] drawings’ carcass cautiously. I’m hoping to defer seepage. 

 

As a rule I, the keeper, adjourn any openings. 

 

The carcass … retained too long … can exhibit troubling infections. Attendees seldom curb their reactions … interrupting … interfering … disturbing any gravity with moans and faux fainting. 

 

In the main gallery a miasma of humours nourishes numerous and diverse atmospheric conditions … obligatory for the interpretation and subsequent rendering of a drawings’ remains. Meanwhile the museum mimes scrutinise the archive for any significant signs. Their mourning attire habitual … for the time of day.

 

The breadth of the archive ambles accordingly … the marks of connotation(s).

 

‘D' … Dirge drawings … silent for almost a year … equivalence … half for six months … elongated … employing cold pressed paper edged between a cavernous black perimeter. In reply I practice with a narrow frame whilst reciting fragments.

 

Aside: I will attempt to amend the exhibit labels … re-present them as memorial cards … title, material, dimensions, category of decay, where archived, and perhaps also a verse of unfortunate philosophical theory. 

 

The notice states: 

 

A duplicate of the exhibit label will be accessible immediately and subsequently erased so that individuals wishing to closely inspect or research any particular carcass can make an appointment in advance with the keeper and the request will be denied. 

 

The gallery attendants mime by the drawn carcass … each chosen for their resemblance … attired in black with white handling gloves … masked in wax … imagines … stained with ink … barefoot … mimetic drawings of drawings’ carcass.

 

Now ambling in procession, two masked mimes mimic the mannerisms of drawings’ body … intending to re-present the ancestors of the archives come to the museum in order to provide their relatives with a drawn line through the galleries … symbolic protectors of the freshly drawn … eventually slumped by any available doors awaiting the opportunity to colour [in] between the outlines with tall crayons. Each crayon has a shadow affixed near the top from which a length of charcoal black paper, secured with a large bow near the middle of the crayon, drifts. 

 

The first mumbles fragments … 

 

‘Drawing is the space between words …’

 

‘Drawing is in the space between words …’

 

‘Drawing in the space between words …’

 

‘Drawing … the space between words …’

 

'Drawing … the space in between words …’

 

And so, it flows …  

 

The second [a]muses … completely silent delivers a kiss … soon to be ash.

 

We withdraw from the procession to an alcove. Alongside which are two large nails. I open a pair of cupboard doors and we challenge some small wooden cartoons balanced precariously on the back of a  statuette. It is an image of a donkey grinding a pencil subsequently recognised as Gabriel Chêne.

 

Each exposed carcass a rite of passage … imagines … attending the carcass from the sphere of the living to that of the fading … I am a fragment … waiting for the transition to be complete … a linear link between the past of the museum of which the carcass’s would contribute, and its future, [re]presented by the surviving scrawls who are stirred by example. 

 

The procession is concluded …  the transition complete … the imago (image) hung as best fitting … living in our shared memory … keeping past and future connected … accompanying, in turn, its own descent to the archives.

 

 

 

Phil Sawdon is an artist, writer, erstwhile academic and The Keeper and founder of The Fictional Museum of Drawing. He is an Honorary Fellow of Loughborough University School of Creative Arts. He resides in the UK in Oadby, Leicestershire. He publishes in various formats including prose drawing fictions, artworks, academic/scholarly books, sound-works and moving image. You can experience most of his writings at the Loughborough University Research Repository. He co-edits the academic book series ‘Drawing In’ (Bloomsbury). He also works with Deborah Harty as the creative drawing collaboration ‘humhyphenhum’ and with Russell Marshall as ‘Marshall and Sawdon’.