Drawing and Memory

The chapter looks at how drawing can be used as a primary working method to record and reinvent places, people and communities who inhabit them. It also proposes that the urgent, shorthand nature of drawing can be a direct conduit to the imagination and unconscious. Working with the King’s Cross as an example of a place in the process of architectural regeneration and transition, the chapter investigates the ways buildings and locations can be interpreted in non-literal ways and transformed into containers and metaphors for stories, concepts and imaginative depictions. The ‘in between’ state of the slowly transforming railway lands of KX is of central interest with its overlapping of architectural histories - influenced and informed by Georges Seurat’s depictions of the banlieues of Paris in the late nineteenth century. ‘Drawing and Memory’ also discusses Howeson's working process for specific projects: the use of a digital camera (allowing the deliberate mis-programming of camera settings to influence final decisions on colour in the final drawings), sketch books and diary notes to record arrested moments in time and evoke the idea of commemoration and the past