A philosophical investigation

"Said Doctor Bunny Rabbit, staring at his shadow black,
"Indeed, I had no notion that I looked so like a quack!"

I wanted to re-visit Wittgenstein's duckrabbit thought experiment after setting myself the task in the studio of pursuing 2 different approaches to drawing; namely, drawing from observation and drawing from my imagination. The idea was to consider how these 2 different approaches to drawing effected the outcome. Of course, I realize that making art is hardly an empirical process, and that setting up an 'experiment' in the studio often produces something unrelated to the experiment itself, it was nevertheless a means to look at how I see. What I found through these drawing exercises is that the process of looking and seeing (observing and imagining) are bridged by an hallucinatory space. While drawing I sense what I can only describe as a sort of zooming between microcosm and macrocosm; and a sort of flipping between inside and outside. This seems to be occurring both on the page and in my body. It feels so radically ambiguous, a perpetual de-stabilization of the figure and ground, body and page, tool and hand, eye and mind.



There is a clearly written introduction to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations on wikipedia. I found 'A Shadow Show' on BibliOdyssey's blog.