NEWS!

Forthcoming Exhibitions

EV+A International, Ormston House, Limerick (2025)

Luan Gallery (2026)

Drawing Centre, Diepenheim, Netherlands (2026)

Limerick City Art Gallery (solo) (2026)

Completion of PhD (Creative Arts) Loughborough University, UK (2020-2026); Drawing in-Space: Developing a Practice-Based Methodology for Attuning to Atmospheres through Gestural Mark-Making

How can drawing operate as a phenomenological and pathic practice that registers the spatialised emotions of atmospheres encountered in everyday lived experience? This practice-based research investigates the hypothesis that drawing is phenomenology of pathic practice. This proposition is explored through an emergent interplay between practice and theory, grounded in a first-person perspective. This research offers an alternative perspective to explicate the drawing process through a new phenomenological lens that extends everyday experience beyond the five senses to include a pathic sense rooted din bodily awareness.[1] The research proposes drawing as a pathic practice that constitutes a form of embodied pathic knowledge and perceptual responsiveness grounded in the felt body and specialised emotion.

In this research, drawing is developed as a relational, affective, and pre-reflective activity attuned to this spatial and emotional forces of atmosphere, rather than a representational or expressive act of authorship. Atmospheres are considered not as passive backgrounds but rather as affective, quasi-material forces that shape the conditions under which drawing emerges. These expressive spatial forces influence the act of drawing in-situ and are registered by the felt body as impulse, force and gesture.

[1] The concept of ‘pathicity’ is understood as “affective involvement that the perceiver feels unable to critically react to or mitigate the intrusiveness of” (Griffero 2017, vii).  It is the ability to “receive effects rather than produce them, to be possessed by what happens and to act only in light of this rapture” (Ludwig Klages (1974) as sited by Griffero (2020)). Pathic knowledge is perceiving intuitively in an involuntary and affective mode and involves “emotions, the body, the poetic.” (Van Manen 2014, 268). Griffero argues for a pathic neo-phenomenological to redefine philosophy as a “reflection on what one feels with the felt body in the space in which one dwells” (Griffero 2020, 24; Schmitz, 1964, 14–27). The theory aims to restore the involuntary and immediate everyday life experiences as an holistic and affective felt-bodily perception.

1.The concept of ‘pathicity’ is understood as “affective involvement that the perceiver feels unable to critically react to or mitigate the intrusiveness of” (Griffero 2017, vii).  It is the ability to “receive effects rather than produce them, to be possessed by what happens and to act only in light of this rapture” (Ludwig Klages (1974) as sited by Griffero (2020)). Pathic knowledge is perceiving intuitively in an involuntary and affective mode and involves “emotions, the body, the poetic.” (Van Manen 2014, 268). Griffero argues for a pathic neo-phenomenological to redefine philosophy as a “reflection on what one feels with the felt body in the space in which one dwells” (Griffero 2020, 24; Schmitz, 1964, 14–27). The theory aims to restore the involuntary and immediate everyday life experiences as an holistic and affective felt-bodily perception.