Mind Maps 
a psysmographic  project

A revelation born out of the work from the previous two years in the graduate program was that my moments of depression or anxiety did not exist on their own, but instead were interlaced with other emotions at the same time. While episodes of depression tend to last longer than what feels like fleeting moments of anxiety, the wide range of mental states I experience can also last for differing amounts of time. I sought to create a piece that depicted this combination of feelings while also adhering to a process that reflected time. As seen in Plate 25, I drew an image of my bed sheet from during the pandemic, and as the drawing grew across the paper nailed to the wall, snapshots of moments of other emotions appeared in frenetic marks. Mind Map II, seen in Plate 26 was the final piece created for this exhibit. The expressive markings do not combine with the drawing in this composition but instead are all placed above the bedsheet.

​Automatic drawing can be described as “expressing the subconscious.” It is implied that one should draw randomly across the paper, without any rational thinking. There is no rational control at all. As a product, there is a drawing, produced by the subconscious with the goal to discover something about the psyche of an author. In case that the author uses ‘ratio’ or mind in his/her drawing, the subconscious would be repressed and no single link with the depths of a person’s psyche could be expressed. That is why channeling a spirit is one of the main goals of automatic drawing with a completely free hand "putting" psyche onto the surface. Finally, drawing automatically is inherently linked with automatism, which is an art-making process where the subconscious is allowed to create - hence the name automatic drawing. Of course, psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud influenced this method of art making a lot, particularly Freud’s theories about the conscious and the subconscious. (Pereira)
    My works that include automatic drawing came from an interest to remove the element of thinking and planning in order to give my raw feelings a platform to exist. I was not aware of this genre of artmaking prior to trying it on my own, but once I learned about the purposes of automatism, the goals coincided with my own. In reflecting on the spontaneous, feeling-driven marks I made in my work, I found that the format in which I created the drawings affected the readings of them later. For example, the automatic marks I made as entries on separate pages in a journal felt like a definitive statement of my exact feelings for that moment in time. While the more intense emotions sometimes surface in this way, more often my daily life is a combination of feelings coexisting, shining and then fading into the background. To depict this sensation of multiple feelings at once, I was compelled to integrate the automatic mark-making into works that were already about other mental states. It was this idea that formed the basis for my most recent pieces of work, the Mind Map drawings. The Monthly Marks books were also experiments in blending automatic drawing with planned, composed marks. These raw, expressive moments as documented by these markings played a major role in both of these bodies of work in my thesis exhibition Psysmograph.

All content © Michelle Drummy 2019 unless otherwise specified.