Large, yawning sound marks produced by bowed cymbals and a prayer bowl dominate the space before settling into soft, enveloping waves. These lower tones evoke languid, flowing lines. Each 'yaaaw' extends in a gentle arc, reaching a peak before receding. I understand this movement in my body, as the act of bowing recalls the gesture of drawing, where broad rotations from the shoulder trace an arc outward and then back.

Later, a drumbeat on skin, aligned in measured, repetitive units, builds tone like cross-hatching. Sometimes the consistency forms a soft ground, a tone under other more opaque sonic marks. At times the consistent beat climbs to create loud, dark tones, creating a harsh, dense, everywhere.

Drawing with sound, holding a drawing mindset, I imagine sounds as lines in time as I lay them out. Each percussive mark twists in space, a trajectory in time.

Being inside an improvised, collaborative sound-drawing feels like a process of call and response. It requires a drawing mindset, an expectation of making lines in time. Resisting musical habits and learned temporal structures, this mindset allows each sound to arise as a mark, responsive to the moment, attentive to what has just passed. The purpose is not to build an overarching composition, but to hold presence, to follow the line forward with care and intent.

This line-to-line attentiveness, the gravity of one sound-mark pulling the next, echoes the sensibility cultivated through years of process drawing—the habit of watching forms unfold, one after another, while keeping the body tuned to the leading edge of the line. Drawing, like improvising sound, often unfolds in a localised space and time, ‘less concerned with the overall composition than with the internal logic of the marks relative to each other.’¹ In this way, both practices prioritise relationship over resolution. Improvised sound relates to process drawing through a shared logic, a sequence of gestures, each one contingent and responsive to the last.

In 2023, I undertook a research project titled SOUND AS FORM / Percussive Drawing in collaboration with musician Saskia Shearer.² Developed through a four-day workshop and live sound-drawing performance at DRAW Space Gallery, the project examined the shared characteristics—repetition, time, duration, speed, transparency, tone, negative space, direction, and contrast—between the two modalities; sound and drawing. At its centre was a desire to understand the ways sound can be a medium for drawing. What the research revealed was the important and dynamic interplay between the mindset of drawing and the improvisational logics of sound. This research was presented at The Material Image conference at the National Art School in 2024.³ 

Before the live performance, the audience was invited to close their eyes and experience the work as a sound-drawing. This instruction creates an expectation and primes the audience to receive subsequent sonic stimuli with a drawing mindset. A situation art historian E. H. Gombrich might call, a ‘guided projection,’ when ‘the context of action creates conditions of illusion.’⁴ Creating context allows each performative gesture to resolve as sound, then heard, felt, and visualised in the mind's eye. A circuit forms: gesture → sound → image. Sound-drawing unfolds as a kind of circular, collaborative conjuring. The audience co-creates the work by tracing the arc of sounds as visualisations in the mind's eye, shaped by personal histories of listening and drawing.

There are many examples of sound-based artworks that ask the audience to visualise an outcome. An early example is Barry Le Va's Velocity Piece: Impact Run—Energy Drain (1969), an audio recording of the artist running back and forth in a long gallery, colliding repeatedly with the wall at each end until exhaustion. In the absence of the artist, the viewer experiences the work as spatialised sound—an audio track of the artist's exertion—along with scuff marks and blood on the gallery walls. In a process of collaborative conjuring, the audience completes the work by imagining what has occurred. A more recent example, Drawing in the Wind (2022), by Dr Cally Shadbolt, was produced by placing sound-making devices (sound bows) along a climbing mountain track. As the wind picks up, sound traces the mountain's profile. The audience can imagine the drawing in their mind's eye and understand the work as a line moving through space in time; an experience which draws equivalence between sound-based and drawn gestures.

Traditionally, the feeling of drawing consists of the physical register of mark-making—its rhythms, resistances, and releases. Physiologically, there is a resonance between the gesture that produces sound and that which produces drawing: a shared kinaesthetic lineage, a kind of haptic attunement found in muscle memory and learned experience. In sound-drawing, the physical sound-making gesture, the sonic trace it creates, and the image it conjures are entangled. To explore sound as a medium for drawing is to enter an open field of inquiry, where movement draws on embodied learning to abstract sound as image.

Following the initial workshop, where we explored the interplay between drawing and sound-making, I created two large drawings to document what we had learned. These are visual research reports which capture the equivalence of repetition, time, duration, tone and negative space, across both modalities. Completing the research arc from drawing through sound and back to drawing highlighted the close relationship between gestures in mark-making and gestures in sound-making. The visual reports are supplementary information and are best seen after experiencing the sound-drawing performance, so as not to limit the experience.

What the research Sound as Form reveals is not a conclusion, but a continuation—an expanded field in which drawing might be understood by how it behaves rather than what it looks like. Approaching sound as a medium for drawing shifts focus from the visual to the temporal, from the object to the process, and from external to internal embodied experience. It affirms drawing as an intention or mindset, as a time-based, bodily activity, a relational and provisional process, unfolding in time. This shift invites new practices and ways of thinking, asking us to re-evaluate the way we understand drawing.

From a practice-led perspective, what emerges most strongly is not a fixed outcome but a set of attunements: to the gestures that produce sound, the memory of mark-making held in the body, and the subtle interplay between action and perception across modalities. Collaborative conjuring, as experienced in this work, gestures toward an expanded notion of drawing, one that is performative and co-constituted by artist, material, environment, and audience. It calls for a deeper understanding of how drawing is not only made but also received, inviting us to look to the discipline's outer edges for new insights into one of the oldest forms of expression.