SCULPTURESQUE DRAWING

“My drawings come from an accumulation of methods that I have developed in order to manipulate paper to produce a particular series of results. I work closely with my assistant on this, as she does most of the meticulous texturing of the surface of the paper, whereas I tear and charcoal, and she then glues it all down. We are now a well-oiled machine of textures.”3

For almost the past 15 years, we have known Nadiah through her charcoal drawings, which are leaning towards realism. Most of Nadiah’s drawings came with no frames, and were installed with spaces between the drawing and the wall. In the vocabulary of exhibition-making, we can simply call these kinds of works as wall-pieces—works that are displayed on a wall, which can be paintings, sculptures, drawings, sketches, archives, or anything. In our conversation, Nadiah referred to these works as drawings. In the caption, Nadiah referred to them as drawing-on-paper collage. However, the process of making these works was actually a process of sculpting, not drawing—that we can call the results “drawing”, is another matter.

If we speak of Nadiah’s drawing process using sculptural terms, we can say that she used the additive process, as in an assemblage or model making with clay for casting.4 Paper collage meant the stacking and sticking paper on top of another. Nadiah applied the charcoal to the paper scraps using a blending technique to produce different shadings. Patches of these scraps thus became dimensions. If the charcoal blend was thickened at the edges of the scraps, the dimension would also look thicker, and “deeper”, so that our eyes would perceive them as shadows.

I will try to examine two of Nadiah’s works in an attempt to comprehend what she referred to as the “a set of results’’ of tearing, stacking, applying charcoal, and sticking papers on top of each other. We should also give more attention to the words “tear”, “charcoal”, and “sticking” as the technique of creating texture. In a drawing, the texture is a motif in the form of a flat image. Meanwhile, in sculpting terminology, the texture depends on the material, the processing method of the material, and the polishing process. The dimensions in Nadiah’s drawings were the result of the process of tearing and sticking papers that had been applied with charcoal—she didn’t refer to these methods as colouring or drawing. Because of the process that Nadiah went through, I decided to call her drawings: Sculpturesque drawings.

As “a well-oiled machine of textures”, the collaboration between Nadiah and her assistant, Desri Surya Kristiani, was indeed seamless. At the beginning of preparing for the Dewi exhibition, I was so curious about the sculpturesque drawing technique that I decided to interview both of them. From the interview, I learned that they could finish each other’s sentences when talking about the techniques, vocabularies, and the detailed steps of the making of these sculpturesque drawings. It should come as no surprise to me, they have been working together for almost 15 years. Their trust in each other regarding the steps they were going to take and their conviction that they had the same purpose was profound. At first, I wanted to refute their statement—“a machine working seamlessly”—because humans were certainly not machines. However, how could I? After all, the “mistakes” in the process of making these sculpturesque drawings could be considered non-existent. If they failed when trying to achieve the desired form, both would accept the failure as a lesson. They both believed that the mediums they used—paper, charcoal, glue, hands, etc.—were the natural limitation of what they could achieve. From each failure, they learned something new about the material and their aptitude. Even though there were no written records, the distinctive vocabulary they used to talk about the process of working together was already a piece of empirical evidence.

If we look at Nadiah’s drawings in space, there is a kind of temptation to approach the wall and see the works from the side—either to know how they were assembled or to see the thickness of the paper. If we adjust our point of view for a moment—from looking at a sculpture to a drawing—the edges of these paper scraps could be seen as outlines. These “lines” gave the sense of depth. Although the light source in Nadiah’s drawings generally came from the front, similar to images from a photo studio, the papers pasted on top of each other displayed a spatial experience that was completely different from most drawings on paper.

Nadiah applied four shades of grey, or in other words, there were four thicknesses of charcoal applied to the scraps of paper that make up the hair of the ghost Sundal Bolong. The first shade of grey, the lightest one, was the general area of the hair. The next two shades of greys gave dimensions to the hair. The fourth and the last grey, the thickest grey, brought depth and a sense of space. Nadiah rubbed the last grey only on the edges of the torn papers used to form the hair bun, and this created the shadow of the bun. The relatively thin and fine charcoal applications—the second and the third—were used alternately by Nadiah on the scraps of papers under the bun, bringing out the impression of curls in Sundal Bolong’s hair. The Reckoning was exhibited in artjog, Yogyakarta (2021) and artina , Sarinah, Jakarta (2022).) In this work, the wrinkles on the face of the figure inspired by Calon Arang looked bolder because Nadiah applied thicker charcoal to the edges of the torn papers. In one of our conversations, Nadiah said, “I outlined those scraps of paper again, mbak.” Technically, instead of making lines along the edges of the scraps, she rubbed more charcoal on them. For the hair, Nadiah’s charcoal strokes tended to have the same level of thickness. How could we identify each strand of the figure’s hair? In fact, every single one of them was a scrap of paper!

It is true that, in an exhibition space, Nadiah’s works will more likely be seen as drawings. However, considering the techniques, Nadiah went through a sculpting process. The only drawing term that Nadiah used to talk about these works was shading. “Those textures are created from years of manipulating paper—peeling, tearing, shading, lining, glueing, and re-shading again. It is a rigorous practice between me and the paper.” 5 According to the drawing lexicon, shading was needed to bring out the depth—in other words, the spatiality—of the object being drawn.