Morfill, S., 2025.

From gesture to trace - drawing as a transformative practice

David McNeil (b.1933), a pioneer in the field of Gesture Studies, writes about the thinking hand. His studies explore the links between gesture and speech, proposing how gesture, as part of the communicative process, supports understanding. Where, in the early 19th century, Heinrich von Kleist observes and connects 'convulsive movement' and 'embarrassed gestures' with the production of thought whilst speaking, McNeill classifies these primarily unconscious gestures to identify and understand their specificity as communicative functions. In contrast to the fleeting, ephemeral character of co-speech gestures that support the verbal expression of ideas, gestures in relation to drawing are understood as 'actions that are registered and suspended in time' (Newman et al, 2003). Thus, the production of thought whilst drawing takes visual form as gestures that dance across the paper's surface leaving indexical traces of the one who draws.
The exploratory artistic practice referred to in this illustrated presentation aligns these ephemeral and registered gestures, asking whether co-speech gesture can be interpreted as a form of drawing. By digitally capturing the motion of the hands whilst speaking and translating the lines of movement into tangible material traces, the work creates a bridge between a past event and a present partial reconstruction. In this process, the hybrid digital-analogue methods employed challenge received thought around the immediacy of drawing, placing temporal distance between the event and its trace through a sequence of displacement and deferral.
The visuals and analysis presented here offer observations on what these transformative methods can reveal.