portfolio

The most laconic description of the drawing as a process is to leave a trace with a tool selected by the artist on a material specified for the artistic intervention. The drawing is the shortest and quickest way to visualize ideas, and in this sense, the spontaneous reaction leading to the appearance of lines on the drawing surface as well as the unintentional gesture, is sealed directly into the final result. The American anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake formulates the making of art as “the ability to shape and thereby exert some measure of control over the untidy material of everyday life». For Boryana Petkova, drawing is an act of understanding the world, and not an artistic practice with particular media. She documents the drawing process from different points of view – physical movement of the hand and interaction with architecture and its surfaces, the sounds produced by the one who is drawing and the music derived of these sounds, or computer-modelled three-dimensional shapes, the specifics of observation in drawing, or briefly – Boryana analyses the line’s ability to follow the movement of thought. In one of his studies, the British professor Tim Ingold, presented the development of the idea of the line through Indian communication systems, along threads in fabrics and quipu, ancient ceramics, the sand drawings of the Australian tribe Walbiri, geographic maps, musical notation, the writing system and calligraphy, the pattern of connections that are used by research and genealogy and so on. In conclusion, one of his findings is that “the fragmented postmodern line does not progressively pass from one destination to another, but from one point of rupture to another. These points are not locations but dislocations, segments out of joint.” The hand that holds the pencil in Boryana’s works does not just draw lines on the white plate, it scours territories, creates paths, gives a meaning to surfaces, leaves traces of work in limited spaces, traces describing emotional states, traces of immediate reactions to the physical environment, traces of the effort to overcome borders. Along these routes, the artist tracks the possibility of restoring missing links or reflects on the cause of their loss in the context of an increasingly fragmented world. Irina BATKOVA curator