Curated by the well known Turkish Cypriot artist Sümer Erek, an exhibition “The Need to Doodle” brought different artists, showcasing their imagination and shores of creativity.
“During the first days a child learns to cycle, their sole aim is to pedal without falling. They take little notice of the traces their tyres leave, or where the tyres lead. Later, as they eventually gain control over the pedals and the wheels, they start choosing their path consciously. Now the child has the journey in mind: they focus on the traces, they wait for the outcome” says Mr Erek. He also put remarks on the significance of the exhibition as:
“As people’s relationship with doodling can be thought as following a similar trajectory every child scribbles. Humans have evolved to think through lines and to transform their thoughts into scribbles, creating space for new ideas. We can trace this thousands of years old journey back to the cave walls of Lascaux and Altamira or the drawings of animal and human figures on rocks in Africa. Through scribbling humans make sense of the world which surrounds them. Whether it is a tree, an animal or a face, people touch the object they’re drawing. With our eyes we measure the contours of the object, while the pencil, chalk or coal becomes an extension of our hand, and transforms these contours to lines. Doodling is a physical and cerebral process, one nourishes the other. It is a thinking process without words which we adopt to plan, draft, note and, at times, to solve.”
In the exhibition, instead of engaging with questions such as the reason artists doodle, or the role and importance of sketches in contemporary art practices, the artists state that they attempt to draw attention to humans’ fundamental need to scribble, perhaps as primal as the need to breathe and eat. In this context they have featured those who use doodling merely as a form of self-expression, alongside professional artists who use their doodles as a draft or approach their sketches as works in themselves.
