Drawing as Situated Artist Research in Place and Relation

This paper explores situated drawing as a method of attending to place, memory, and embodied knowledge through an artist-researcher practice developed along the north coast of Northern Ireland. Working through walking, observational drawing, annotation, photography and animation, it treats drawing not as a secondary record of place but as a way of thinking with it, The paper asks what becomes visible when drawing is understood as a cartography of practice: not a neutral map viewed from above, but a relational tracing produced through movement, pause, encounter, affect and the layered social histories held in particular sites.

Grounded in a body of practice shaped by public space, contested memory, and the lived textures of everyday environments, the discussion considered how drawn lines can register what conventional mapping often leaves aside: hesitation, residue, fragility, repetition, care, and the slow negotiations through which place is inhabited. Particular attention is given to coastal and edge environments, where the physical tension between sea and land offers a potent site of inquiry. Here, drawing becomes a way of attending to instability, threshold and change: to exposure and shelter, movement and pause. The meeting of sea and land is understood not simply as landscape, but as a dynamic and unsettled condition through which questions of boundary, belonging, and memory can be re-read.
In this frame, drawing becomes a situated form of inquiry that moves between the sensory and the critical. It offers a way to hold artistic process and research method together without forcing experience into overly stable or extractive forms. Rather than claiming mastery over site, the paper argues for drawing as an ethics of attention. The drawn line is both aesthetic and methodological: a means of noticing, returning, and remaining with complexity. By positioning drawing as a form of cartographic practice, the paper contributes to current conversations on situated knowledge, expanded drawing, and practice-based research. It proposes that drawing can function as a critical and reflective method for engaging places marked by layered histories, unresolved tensions, and fragile forms of belonging.