I drew Spruce’s shield from the collection of the British Museum (Am.2129) in early 2020. The shield is 60cm in diameter, and the drawing is close to 1:1 scale. Spruce collected 2 shields, and while the weaving in the one in Kew’s collection (EBC 67762) is in overall good condition, the British Museum’s shield has breakages around the rim and in the centre (Figure 1). This was helpful when I started to draw as it allowed me to see where joins existed, how different sections started and finished, and to see ‘inside’ areas. This kind of ‘paying attention’ to every part of an outward surface has always been important in my practice, a way of knowing something intimately.
Figure 1. Shields collected by Richard Spruce at British Museum. Am.2129 (left) and the Economic Botany Collection. EBC67762 (right)
The British Museum storeroom is in Haggerston, behind the canal in a faceless building that a friend’s teenage daughter once scaled in the small hours and got in far more trouble that the climb was worth. The days I work there have to be booked weeks or months ahead, and on my designated drawing day, I arrive early and carefully position the shield with the collection manager Cynthia, and worked like this over several days. Two brushes, one pan of watercolour, I liked working from that angle I chose, tilted as if looking down at the surface but seeing the peak rising at the centre. Sometimes I worked methodically following a single strand of vine, and sometime moving in and out from the centre, tightening and adding detail to certain lines. I have found that when drawing from woven objects the line of the brush or pen very often follows the order of weaving, even if this is something I learn later.
It always seemed to be winter when I was drawing and I remember perpetually cold hands. It’s particular to draw in a room like there where every action and movement is controlled, and stepping outside to have a drink or a break is a waste of the time. Only when Cynthia asked for her lunch would I stop and go to the Turkish café to eat quickly, aware the light after lunch would go dim quickly.
One day from a different level of the building the sound of a conch could be heard – almost felt through your stomach rather than in the ears. I’m not sure the British Museum ever encourage or allow the playing of instruments, so was it one visitor inspired or overstepping? Cynthia leapt up, but she couldn’t leave me working alone so we were trapped for a moment with her feet either side of the door, “get ready to move!”, with the panic of a fire alarm, and then it became clear the problem was being addressed. I love these moments where the spell of stillness is broken.
In the end, this drawing (shown in Figure 2) never worked. It never came to life in the way that some do. It definitely didn’t ‘radiate’ in the way the shield does. I suspected it was to do with the angle I had chosen – not quite a fill circle – appropriate for a still life or an object on a museum shelf but not for something of this importance. Had I reduced it by drawing it in this way when it should have been worn? I thought for a long time about other circles. Giotto’s circle (that line of greatness), Śiva as the Lord of Dance, Atlas holding up the heavens, the ensō sign expressing enlightenment, emptiness, freedom, Korean moon jars- two hemispherical halves that are thrown separately and then joined in the middle with their imperfection symmetry of asymmetry. But these are not all equal notions – Giotto’s circle and ensō are drawn lines, moon jars and atlas’s world is a globe, and the shield is, well what? A spinning disc, a breast, a placenta, a layer of the world?
Figure 2. Shield, watercolour on paper, 2020 (detail)
I realised I had to go back and draw the shield again to find that of thrumming mark on the page that cuts through like the sound of the conch. I started a new version from the shield in Kew’s collection next, pencilling in lines so to see it from above. That was early in March 2020, before the city locked all doors and it was many months before I could return, and by that time with my baby and I didn’t have the time to continue the new drawing. However, I started thinking about it again earlier this year. During fieldwork in March I was talking to Oscarina about her ceramics, and there was a small group of men around us, some anthropologists and some not. The conversation was in Desana, Tuyuka, Portuguese, and English, and I was feeling frustrated as the questions I was asking Oscarina were being ‘clarified’ by others, turning into questions of kinship. I wanted to cut through and address her practice, and either waylay the conversation or bore the others so they would stop joining in. So thinking back to that issue with the shield I asked her if the perfect circle was important to her in her work. Yes. Is asymmetry in the form ever welcomed or valued aesthetically. No. Not much more was said about it but it helpfully led our conversation to the act and not the object, so I remembered that.
Later, in one of the mornings of the workshop, I introduced a very short exercise to demonstrate how to mix colours (Figure 3), based on Goethe’s colour wheel. A circle was divided into six with red, yellow and blue in alternative segments, followed by orange, green and purple in the spaces. An outer circle had the same colours as half tones – red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green etc. In the middle a lighter tone was made. The idea was to show possibilities available with only three colours, and give the artists more control over the way they used paint rather than being limited to using paints directly from the tin/tube. But when everyone began, the thing that took the most time, (and that everyone seemed most compelled by) was drawing accurate circles and clear segments. Danilo Parra pointed this out too and we were teasing everyone – “hurry up, never mind the circle, just focus on the colours!”
Figure 3. Colour wheel workshop in São Pedro community, Rio Tiquié, March 2024
That made me remember this by Stephen Hugh-Jones,
Various spoken metaphors of lines, circles and segments that Upper Rio Negro peoples use to talk about time. These same lines, circles and segments reappear in visible, material form in the familiar domestic world where manioc tubers are processed into flat, round cakes of manioc bread. Here the tipiti manioc press and shallow balay basket suggest line and circle whilst woven designs divide balays into segments just as each cake of manioc bread is cut into four neat segments and stored in a balay.[1]
In the Annual Cycle drawings that ISA has worked on for many years, the visual transcription of these cultural-ecological calendars also have segmented circular designs. (Figure 4)
Figure 4. Annual Cycles. Calendar of Indigenous people of the Rio Tiquié
Returning to Spruce’s shield in Kew, there are patterns in the surface drawn with a latex (known as breu or anani). The shield was photographed under UV light (I need to cite paper and add more information on this) and the patterns could be show more clearly, but even from the daylight photograph the pattern can be seen, two segments radiating out from the centre across the circumference and shorter ‘segments’ in between. (see Figure 1).
I’ve recently unrolled those drawings and thought it was time to work again on the pencil outlines.
It’s hard to know where the motivation comes for drawing one thing over another. But all of this to say that it’s the drawing that provides the ‘noticing’ which makes visual ideas into questions. Most of the ideas or connections that happen when drawing might be fleeting but some stick more. Is the circle important? Yes.
[1] Stephen Hugh-Jones (2016) Writing on Stone; Writing on Paper: Myth,
History and Memory in NW Amazonia, History and Anthropology, 27:2, 154-182