Sensory drawing is about tuning into and recording sensory experiences of the world around us through drawing. The premise is to consider the physicality of drawing, the material qualities of the tool you draw with and how it can be used to translate or express what you sense. Drawing in this way is done with closed eyes, whilst tuning in to a sensation such as a point of touch or a sound, and then translating the qualities of that sensation into marks on paper. The aim is to try to veer away from literal or pictorial interpretations, but purely to focus on sensations, and allow the marks and gestures to come as a consequence.

Sensory drawing is a methodology that feeds in to many of my projects and workshops. It has been developed and adapted to a variety of contexts including one-to-one performance, participatory mapping and sonic drawing. The idea stems from my research into participatory performance art during my MA in Performance and Theatre (Queen Mary University of London, 2010). I was interested in how drawing could be a way of documenting an intimate or visceral encounter with someone, and how such a drawing could emerge as a trace of an experience. Could a drawing create itself?

I devised a piece called “Touch Portraits”, a one-to-one performance which involved me making blindfolded drawings of participant’s faces based on the sensation of touch. As I touched their face with one hand, I simultaneously drew with my other hand and I translated what I felt using a variety of marks on paper. On a superficial level, these drawings mapped the physicality of the face, it’s contours and edges; hard bone became hard marks, and soft tissue soft sweeping gestures. But they also captured something deeper – the dynamic between us, the qualities of touch, and the intimacy of the moment.