Reportage Sketching - 'Unfolding Stories' with Lynne Chapman

you so the Morgan Center for the research into everyday lives has a very strong reputation for working with quite creative and innovative qualitative research methods within our work and within that broader body of work which has moved towards a more visual approach very few people if any sociologists I've been working with observational sketching one of the things that I was particularly excited about when I got the chance to do this residency was the opportunity to immerse myself in the same place the same people for an entire academic year it's been great to have been effectively embedded in our research center for two days a week capturing a year in the life at the center and that's been fantastic to see our what we often think of us are quite mundane academic worlds reflected back us so I'm I first of all start by drawing the students because they're interesting me in the way in which they just look in you know the composition of the way they look but then the lecturer might say something interesting and I might then just completely stop that and jump to the lecture and just make that fit together you've got to select you've got to decide that some things are more interesting than others it's an unconscious process of selection and death selection and some of its to do with what's being said and some is just to do with color a woman with gorgeous red hair dye just suddenly notices towards the end of it right got to draw her yeah I think one of the things that is interesting about sketching is you know we will lead these incredibly busy lives I mean I know you love doing and brushing around you've got loads of things in your head you're always thinking about what you're going to be doing next what sketching does is it stops that train that Express train and lets you get off in between stations and just take a quick look around hanging over this as the question as to why no one was really using Institute observation of sketching as a method from initial discussions of colleagues I wondered if part of that was because we were all a bit terrified of exposing our arming abilities could you learn techniques that would allow you to actually engage with those with those methods in a way that was meaningful and useful in our work one of the things that I've enjoyed about working with the Morgan Center team it's the incredible variety of projects that they're involved with and one of those actually took me into a lab I envisage test tubes and things but of course it was a modern lab didn't that at all well for about seven years now I've been studying a field called synthetic biology and as a sociologist I'm interested in how new ideas get made in science how a new field emerges and consolidates and how it becomes mundane but also how new technologies are produced in a laboratory all the way through to everyday Society so I have become a budding artist since Lynne got started in the Morgan Center but I wouldn't say that it was something that I was comfortable with to begin with at all a lot of what I'm doing is about being in the moment it's about the process and I think if you focus on the process and enjoying just doing what you're doing what you get at the end may or may not be successful but that kind of isn't the point and I think if you if you can actually think in that way it's very liberating I think part of what Lynne's done really well is to help us get used to not being competent at something and as academics that can be quite a challenge because we're used to being experts in whatever it is that we spend our days doing one example of that changed that Lynne has brought to my work in terms of making me look at a space in terms of making me look at the visual elements of the things that I study has happened when I've been in the laboratory with her for example and in the process of trying to draw some of the things that they were doing and managed to spill some substance all over my hands once they cleaned me up they gave me some blue plastic gloves to wear for the rest of the day to do my drawing in and in the laboratory she helped me see for example some of the more boring facts of being in the laboratory sometimes there's just stillness sometimes there's whirring in the background the noises the atmosphere of the laboratory has kind of come to life through the visual sense which was a bit surprising I'm very interested in time I'm interested in the idea that in a standard sketchbook you're just capturing a snapshot of time one thing that happens maybe for two minutes maybe for an hour but with the concertina format you can actually have the passage of time far more easily represented so I might take one particular event that flows across an entire day and I can weave things that happen as they happen I can tuck images together and bits of text and try and get that sense of the flow of the images reflecting the passing of time so the dormant things project it's very much rooted in the Sophie's interesting material culture at the home sophie is going into people's houses rummaging through their cupboards through their wardrobes through their kitchen drawers and getting people to talk about what what is in there and things but then we have this additional layer of lid going into some of those interviews and sketching what's going on we focused in in particular on this particular image which is just her children's painting palette and it was just you know something they'd sat down and done together as a family her and her children and then she put it away not knowing that that was the very last time that that was ever going to happen because they then just grew and she just couldn't bear to wash it let alone throw it away and so that was going to live in the cupboard forever and there was such strong significance to that and resonance with it the fact that I'd actually managed to get that across in the drawing got a really choked up so I think that demonstrates that doing this actually does achieve something extra you what was amazing to see was how people who felt they had no ability of sketching have no confidence of sketching producing some fantastic and really creative work one of the ways in which we did that was to keep our own sketchbooks and individuals but also we collectively had a whole set of concertina sketchbooks of our own which we used in a bit like a chain with a chain sketch of sketchbook called them so over the course of the year these books have been passed around one one person to the next and they produced this beautiful sort of visual collage of how we responded to those themes then also introduce people to the sketch group one was in that town and Cheshire where one of the members lives and we all converged on that town square for the day of sketchy that was a very challenging experience being in the space of the town scram it was very exposing for many of us we felt we were breaking into the space disrupting the space by going and sitting down and actually the initial sketching like I sat there for quite a while thinking what can I sketch without being rude and I'd noticed I didn't sketch anyone who was really close particularly anyone sitting next to me because they kept looking over no one commented saying oh that's wonderful I think the sketch call has incredible potential as a research technique and I think that is something we do want definitely want to experiment with oh the next 12 months particularly for colleagues who are working in very place-based work the thought of bringing together either group of academics or a group of you know to deal with many people from the local community to draw that location to interpret in that space to talk about what it means that seems really empowering sort of approach and one that is very participatory so in a way as full of citizen social science what was quite interesting that I didn't anticipate was the nature in which my techniques evolved over the year so you arrived yet open your care and you go and there was a different kind of sketching that actually evolved from that it's taught us about the power of being able to engage in diversity is concentrated seeing really looking at the world in a visual register and that creates a space I think which is takes us away from so one of the projects that the laboratory that I'm studying at the moment is interested in is making menthol which is a product chemical that's in lots of everyday products like Vicks VapoRub for example and one of the nice things about taking Linh both to the laboratory and into the everyday world to look at these uses of the products was that you get a sense of the difference of these two spaces really from Lin's drawings in the laboratory everything sort of like clean or white or ordered and the menthol seems very small and innocuous but in the everyday wheeled menthol figures as part of things like family life where a mother and her kids for example we'll be using menthol in different ways but people might expect in a laboratory I didn't really know what to expect when I got this opportunity I had no idea what sociologists would really do I really didn't know what the Morgan Center physically looked like I didn't know where they're going to take me and so one of the things that excited me was the idea of the unknown that I was going to draw and what's quite interesting is of course some of it I could have predicted but I certainly would not have expected that I would find myself in a lab drawing a mass spectrometer and I really didn't think that I'd be sitting on a stranger's carpet and drawing the contents of their tea chests I think what most of us are going to take from this is how useful it is to take time out sometimes in relation to our research definitely but also just not generally to sort of take time out and reflect on the topics that we're interested in through this visual media because it takes us into this different headspace it's difficult to think of a way in which you could actually record so many different activities so many different people and get a sense of an overview and a sense of what it feels like to be part of the team at the Mormon Center it's one of the things that I've really enjoyed is that I couldn't have been working with a nice a bunch of people learning how to think in a more visual register has been a very powerful lesson for all of us and one that I think if nothing else for many of us has really made this such a powerful exercise and one that we'll want to continue to work you you you

Channel: Lynne Chapman Artist

Views: 6,992

Keywords: art, illustration, drawing, illustrating, illustrate, sketchbook, painting, research, sociology, Urban Sketchers, Morgan Centre, urban sketching, Lynne Chapman, how to sketch, how to draw, accordion sketchbook, concertina sketchbook

Id: vygD1hN8dJQ

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2016