Drawing Walking

John Stell

Thursday 30th April - Saturday 23rd May

This body of work comes from walking as a means of making drawings and drawing as a way of recording walking. Drawings emerge from the movement of the body creating marks, sometimes inflected by moving light sources in the environment.

The images in this exhibition show quite mundane outings close to home (to and from the local railway station in Mytholmroyd). The process combines recording objective features of the environment with specific traces that reflect the small gestures that hands perform when walking. The images thus result from both subjective personal experience and also from a kind of scientific mapping of the external world.

The interplay between a regular scheme of arrangement and the irregular marks is visible when the same route is followed on different occasions. In this case, the drawings associated with a given route are similar but not identical. The marks have a calligraphic quality, and the mechanism of arrangement suggests the formation of texts through the placing of characters and symbols in ordered combinations.

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John Stell studied Fine Art at Leeds College of Art and Design (BA first class) and is currently

a part-time student on the MFA in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art (MMU). He also has qualifications in Mathematics (BSc) and Computer Science (MSc, PhD) from the University of Manchester. He currently works part-time as a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Leeds. His academic work has included projects connected with space and place in the digital humanities. His artistic practice centres on drawing in a general sense which is also connected with processes of mapping and the experience of space.