I
I
I

—Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” 1976

bright read extent of our

reach beyond grasping


is what abstraction is supposed to give, what imaginary numbers give

in how we work through
little play
complexities
by obstruction,

so we get to

go through someplace else

—Fred Moten, “the red sheaves,” 2023

In her text “Why I Write,” Joan Didion writes, “Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words.”¹ She liked the “I” sound in why; I; write; eye; eye; eye. Didion lists the three I’s down a column. It looks like a formalist drawing or a concrete poem of that isolated sound in canon. Each “I” a new line and the beginning of a new sentence in first person. They look like three cursors waiting—from even before the moment “I” materializes on the page, before the moment of writing. Aubin appropriates this phrase from Didion, using it as the starting point for a poem that opens his Floor Drawing Series (2024).

Aubin adapts and responds to Didion’s question, and drawing, as a kind of architecture for his own inquiry into writing. For Aubin, writing is personal, embodied, and abstract: writing is a means to communicate and express oneself and one’s desires and wishes to another; writing is a physical act; writing is a means to make marks on a surface.

In poetic response to Didion, Aubin italicizes the “I” in his poem, transforming it into a: /. Ironically, de-emphasizing the slanted subject of the sentence. Conflating the linguistic act with the physical one and writing’s material consequence on a surface, Aubin alters Didion’s stolen title and makes an addition: “Why / write / draw.” “I” dissolves and no longer asserts itself in “the reader’s most private space.”² Here, “I” or / is an enigmatic mark, a porous distinction between the interrogative and the act(s). The phrase becomes a self-reflexive question addressed to the person writing and expressing. “I” is writing, reading, drawing, asking itself into existence on the page.

*

Writing is a hand on a surface. Once, the hand held a pen and made marks and lines on paper. Here, it is extending a finger. The finger is touching an iPhone screen. It drags its touch across an abstract virtual distance. It is drawing.

Alongside, another hand is typing.

*

Aubin writes and draws to reflect on his dad’s digital gestures drawn on an iPhone screen, on the Notes app, and his physical struggles to write and communicate late in his life. It is a kind of writing that is recognizable as partial script, marks and lines that make up part of a language, but are indecipherable as words. Words are written, but are unutterable. They remain on the tip of the tongue, failing to successfully communicate themselves and reach their intended reader.

Instead, the reader reaches beyond their grasp³ and attunes to another register of the gesture: the written marks’ aesthetic and expressive qualities, as opposed to linguistic ones, closer to drawing as opposed to writing, a feeling as opposed to a meaning. In the gap between the marks and their expression, and his reading and understanding, Aubin reads the distance in between.

*

Accompanying Aubin’s poem are a series of drawings that move away from language and toward gesture. Aubin’s haptic line-work colours much of these pages. Lines loop and curl around the shimmering edge of a cloud; scratches and scribbles pile and tangle into each other in the gridded depths underneath a bathtub. They coalesce distinct scenes, images, and memories that appear simultaneously mundane and spectacular.

They are a collection of Aubin’s own diaristic digital drawings and notes from his glassy phone translated into physical artworks. He renders his digital drawings and notes into a series of physical outlines cut in vinyl to make stencils. Momentarily, vinyl usurps his gestures while the negative spaces are weeded out. Later, on paper, paint fills in these newly created gaps. In the transfer of these gestures from one surface to another and the inversions and reversals this material translation necessitates, a distance happens between the initial touch from the act of drawing with his finger on the screen and the final physical drawing. These drawings are halves of a material correspondence. Each drawing, a lone translation.

Looking at Aubin’s digitally hand-drawn line-work, his touch is mediated across many different surfaces and processes, but still, his touch comes to the fore in my reading of these works. There is a sense of closeness and intimacy that I get as I engage and view them tactilely. There is also an inherent distance and abstraction that is part of reading and deciphering another’s gestures. I trace them with my finger on my computer screen.

*

Aubin’s writing and drawings are stencilled on panels of hanji jangpan, a kind of traditionally crafted floor panel found in Korean homes, made by laminating sheets of mulberry paper with oil and lacquer until the layers are strong enough to stand on. Aubin marks up and paints the flooring material, transposing his gestures and their negatives onto domestic grounds. Compared to a sheet of glass, a screen, paper, or plywood (other surfaces and materials that resonate throughout Aubin’s practice), the floor is a fundamental surface. A surface that facilitates the essential activities of our lives and habitation. On the other hand, mulberry paper is traditionally used in printmaking, Eastern painting, and calligraphy. Hanji jangpan, in its material processing, fuses these contexts. Inscribed on this layered surface, the diaristic, the artistic, and the domestic meet in Aubin’s writing and drawings.

Where there were once daily gestures from Aubin’s iPhone screen, this touch now exists as hollowed-out gestures that reveal their surface.

*

Floor Drawing Series accumulates moments from Aubin’s life and practice. Like Didion, he writes “entirely to find out what [he’s] thinking, what [he’s] looking at, what [he sees] and what it means. What [he wants] and what [he fears] [...] What is going on in these pictures in [his] mind?”⁴ They contain gestures, memories, and postures that were first lived, and then drawn and written. Perhaps, the act of putting words and marks on a page itself creates distance, reorienting one’s relationship with one’s own experience, and making room to find ways to express and understand what was unutterable and undecipherable, but lived and felt.