SHARD ASSEMBLY

I’m not sure, but this may be a new Transparent Drawing Assembly. For now, I am calling it Shard Assembly.

While in Greece a couple of weeks ago, I dutifully toured as many archaeological museums as I could. For the displays of both pottery and sculpture, what I found intriguing was the way in which the parts of objects were displayed so that you could knowledge the whole.

And I became particularly interested in a type of interpretive drawing in which the pottery figures are outlined, and then the dark black and brown tones represent how the shards that you were looking at fit into the holistic piece. It is as if the dark tones provided a separate knowledge from the whole.

So, what if we use this method to knowledge a form?

The drawing at the top is a first attempt to shard a holistic form. I first knowledged this piece of sculpture (shown on the left), which was originally on the Acropolis, with pencil Lines Without Tones. I then sharded the piece, as if it were a hollow form, by applying dark black and brown acrylic ink tones around the form. As I sharded, I kept looking at Greek pottery shards, as well as the reconstructed drawing, so that the form of my pieces had an authentic shardlike quality.

 

Is this a useful assembly? To me, at least, any assembly which allows a fresh and unique approach to form knowledge is useful. I was still responsible for the holistic form. The process of dividing the form into shards provides a unique focus: I was still paying attention to the folds of the cloth, for example. I was still responsible for the way the piece seems to be lifted by air. So for me, yes, this is very useful. Another assembly that we looked at recently was Woven Villa Savoye.

If it cuts thru the usual, why not try it?

A fundamental premise of Transparent Drawing is that it is open source. The mindset is available as a pathway. Your own pathway can take an infinite number of routes. Shard Assembly is just another pathway portal. And it won’t be in the upcoming book, which I think is great. We are on an ever branching pathway in an ever expanding Universe: no telling what is around the next turn!