1000 Marks- Drawing as Ritual

Our first drawing assignment for Michael’s drawing seminar class:

1000 Marks- Drawing as Ritual

Goal:  Complete a drawing where all the marks are as similar as possible.  Design a specific gesture that can record a single mark.

Consider:  1) a gesture you feel comfortable repeating but challenges your ideas of how drawings should be made. 2) the materials used to make your mark.

Parameters: 1) the mark must be no larger than 3×3 inches, but can be as small as you wish. 2) Avoid image-making; instead focus on mark-making.  The act of making the drawing in this assignment is ultimately more important than the finished drawing.

My first thought was literally, what do I do that’s ritualistic? Well, I sleep, I breathe, I eat, I cook, I exercise, I pee/poop, I bathe, I groom. And then I stopped.  I bathe, I groom.  I recently had a conversation with my coworkers, each of us disclosing what obsessive compulsive habits we secretly harbor.  The only one I could come up with is my OCD-ness around hair in the bathroom.  I really loathe all the hair that accumulates in the bathroom, and especially in the shower drain.  I dislike hair in general, when it’s not attached to someone, and sometimes in large quantities when it’s attached as well.  I can’t pinpoint when my disdain for hair began but I think it was around puberty.  We don’t need to go into the psychology of this but it was about this time in my life when I started collecting my hair on the shower wall when I shampooed it, rather than pull it from the drain when it got clogged.  I’ve always thought of these daily collections as hair drawings.  In fact, my ex-girlfriend, Kat, used to call them my daily Miros.

What better mark than my hair?  It’s literally (I’m very literal) my mark–my DNA.

Hair is a funny thing.   What style we chose to wear it in, it’s length, whether or not we dye it, it’s part of our identity.  It symbolizes beauty, strength, health, age, vitality.  Unattached to us, it’s dead– evidence of our mortality.

Since my arrival to Fargo, I have been thinking about different ways of recording my time here.  I feel so fortunate to have this kind of time to myself.  It makes me realize how busy I’ve been with work and Ultimate.  It’s felt like a blessing.  How do I keep track of my time in Fargo?   This blog was my first idea.  Documenting my environment and activities with photographs and video has been another.

I decided this piece should reflect my time in Fargo so I transitioned my daily shower-hair ritual from shower-to-garbage to shower-to-envelope.  I began collecting my hair in for each day.

The next step in the process, how to adhere my hair and to what?  Canvas was my first choice as it’s a natural fiber, with a sturdy feel to it.  With Michael’s access to the painting studios at NDSU, I was able to acquire scrap canvas discarded by students after stretching their canvas to frames.  I chose a long 6-foot by 1 foot piece.  After testing some gesso and gel medium, I decided to get some matte gel medium–something transparent but not glossy.  I wanted the hair to have a clean, natural look on the backdrop of the canvas.

When I reached 1000 hairs collected slash when the assignment came due, (coincidentally they coincided) I made a time line of hair from March 10th to March 31st.  Each day’s hair varied in number, lengths, color (I lost a few gray ones) but assembled together, they look like an abstract horizontal line.

I put it up in our apartment.  It’s not the most aesthetically beautiful thing I’ve ever seen by a long shot–it’s still dead hair on canvas, I still don’t care for hair not attached to a body, and I’m still new to art making– but it’s my mark and my record of time.

I’m still collecting my hair in envelopes.  It’s hard to part with rituals.  I may have to keep up my new calendar.