Sketchbooks as aesthetic transducers

Barker, Garry ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1686-3738 (2026) Sketchbooks as aesthetic transducers. Drawing: Research, Theory and Practice. ISSN 2057-0384 (In Press)

Abstract

An exploration of the role that sketchbooks take within a particular artist’s practice, that explores the metaphor of the sketchbook as an aesthetic transducer. In order to do this the drawn documentation of experience, collected together in the artist’s sketchbooks, is explored as a system of metaphors. We receive experiences via our neurological network as qualia and as such they constitute a fundamental component of consciousness. By regarding sketchbooks that record these experiences as energy converters, this paper argues that they can also be regarded as materialisations of an artist’s consciousness. The paper also highlights how sketchbooks are used to record ideas, memories and perceptions and how they can be used to interconnect them. The sketchbook in effect becoming an interface between the interior and exterior worlds that the artist inhabits. In order to understand how these interconnections operate, sketchbooks are regarded as aesthetic transducers, that support the drawn interrogation of perception and interoception, as the artist develops visual forms for ideas that are never quite logical, never totally intuitive, but always a product of the act of drawing.

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