Ingibjörg Magnadóttir’s drawings occupy a distinct and isolated aspect of her creative output as an artist. Her performative installations are the mainstay of her practice and are surreally crafted, displaying worlds resplendent with symbolic tropes, arcane myths and African priestesses. Her drawings, however, have never been shown in an exhibition format and they remain chiefly private. She draws on small sheets of white cartridge paper, using crayons and pens or sometimes watercolour paint, they are quickly executed, expressive and child-like in their appearance. Seemingly her intent is not to convey dexterity, to master the translation of the visible world onto paper, but to mark the surface. Their overt simplicity calls for an autotelic reading, an essentialism which renders the work as instinctive and private to the artist (Kovats 2007; Petherbridge 2010). But this is not to equate such drawings with working sketches or preparatory studies; rather they occupy a more undefined or fluid identity for the artist. They support an approach to drawing which deems it to be pre-conceptual and which offers a kind of process of relating to the world that comes before any registering of it cognitively (Ruskin 1991). This paper delineates this displacement and considers the contribution that the drawings formal properties play within this transformation. More specifically I reflect upon how their form creates a lacuna that potentially supports this shift in context and meaning, opening up a space through the work that allows for the privately drawn line to be reimagined though an ethnographic lens. In what follows I argue that this movement is legitimised through two avenues: a collapse of ethnography’s singularity of method and description and the expansive definition of curation, which allows my work as an ethnographer to be imagined within this role. Taken together this, potentially, allows anthropology to occupy the position of co-author.

This paper was given at Coventry University’s conference Drawing Conversations: Reflecting upon Collective and Collaborative Drawing Experiences in 2015.

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