Drawn

So having been busy driving tractors and spending hours in fields as they are transformed from one state to another i was struck by how this continuous working or perhaps growing is a never ending cycle of "not yets" - [some might think its all about harvesting being the culmination when instead its one part - when combining for example we talk of the next job - land working and "doing better next time", when land working we think of drilling and when drilling of spraying and so on.......], which resonated with our thinking about propositional drawing and made me reflect again on what Amanda wrote - I think maybe when something is propositional it is not imagining itself as here and now and finished and fully resolved, but as 'not yet' ..... Something propositional is on the edge of becoming, its there to point to what could be...... the point for me is......whether it is full of desire for might yet be.  As farmers we are full of desire/belief for the might yet be- for the seed sown to be the best yet, the mole ploughing to enable better drainage and the muck spread to make it more fertile - all acts aiding the next 'not yet' - the becoming-scape.
The farmed-scape, or Taskscape as Tim Ingold would say, is then by its very nature becoming....in fact it reflects its long history of that. But i suppose we must consider our actions/our growing as farmers in relation to sublime quantities of time, weather, geology, the world. We function within a larger system and as such are inseperable and evolve - in fact we grow together.  If we then accept that we do not make landscape, but instead create conditions for growth and are part of earths transformation of itself, we are not authors or in control instead we are implicated, incorporated; inscribing our actions like those before onto a ever changing surface.

Yes, this is all well and good but if by understanding landscape, the farmscape and my position within it, it allows me to consider my practice and then for that practice to look as it does like drawing then i can move forward. I do believe that what i do here on the farm is drawing both conceptually and physically: we inscribe/scratch/dwell/make marks and lines - and of course it is by its very nature outlined above - propositional [in my understanding of the word].

So if i then apply this to think about what Steve and I do it seems not dissimiliar - no it doesnt make Steve and I farmers instead of artists, but perhaps it does make us growers and perhaps, if your following my thinking, make our practice/actions drawing......and propositional at that.  Like Steve said in the email to Andy Parker - practice as a conceptual drawing process - the mark as a thought moment?  and ...inscribing a small part of ourselves onto things, one object making a mark on another by carving into it's surface. I have a sense that our practice is about working within transforming spaces and transforming accordingly, about setting a seed and letting it be affected by factors beyond our control, of knowing the spaces we work in are not passive, of being implicated, of accepting that intervention is part of the next 'not yet' - that the work is always 'becoming' - not finished or resolved but showing potentiality. All of which makes it sound improvised/improvisatory but of course its more considered, rigorous and complicated than that. Is the considered about control or authorship - no, its like spreading muck its one action of many, done out of desire and belief that it will help/be effective. 

I believe the landscape is not repeatedly wiped clean, but instead an evolved series of collapsed acts and this description seems to fits the look of our practice. It describes a never ending stretch of action reaching off into the future from the past [the making is continuous - Andy Parker] ....seems to me if I were to draw it, its not too different from the diagram we drew for YAS - its just the NOW is further along the line.