Gladman’s lines are very much of the body as it extends the body’s syntax and grammar onto the page, filling it with crossings, cosmologies, topographies rather than legible, discernable language. In Prose Architectures, Gladman creates more than just writing or drawings-she creates dwelling places.
But they resist figurative representation, instead creating richly imagined abstract spaces.īoth writing and drawing practices share a concern with the limits of language, an emphasis on documenting presentness (in thought and the body), and a preoccupation with architecture.
The 100-plus drawings that follow evoke cityscapes and city shapes. Drawing was going into time it was pulling the process of thought apart, and what was most profound was that it left a record behind, a map: the drawing itself." It produced a sense that thinking could and did happen outside of language: I saw it as a line extending from the body, through the hand, as if something were being poured or pulled out of oneself, but here, finally, because it is impossible to achieve this in writing, in time with thought rather than chasing thought through syntax, as something already over, a moment we can now only describe. "Drawing extended my being in time it made things slow. Gladman beautifully uses the drawings as an extension of her writing process, as a way to free language from constraint.Įxcerpt from Prose Architectures introduction by Renee Gladman: A 2014-15 fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant and a 2017 Lannan Foundation Writing Residency in Marfa, TX, she lives and makes work in New England.A book of ink drawings that regards language as an exposed nervous system, uncovering the moment whereby architecture emerges out of prose, the sentence becomes a drawing, and the act of writing narrative can be examined from bodily movements. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Harper's,BOMB magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is the author of eleven published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians-Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), andHouses of Ravicka (2017)-as well as the recently released Prose Architectures, her first monograph of drawings, and Calamities, a collection of linked auto-essays on the intersections of writing, drawing, and community, which won the 2017 CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose.
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