Sketchbooks as aesthetic transducers: An artist’s reflection on a metaphor

This article is an exploration of the role that sketchbooks take within a particular artist’s practice, which examines the metaphor of the sketchbook as an aesthetic transducer. In order to do this, the drawn documentation of experience, collected together in the artist’s sketchbooks, is explored as a system of metaphors. We receive experiences via our neurological network as qualia; as such, they constitute a fundamental component of consciousness. By regarding sketchbooks that record these experiences as energy converters, this article argues that they can also be regarded as materializations of an artist’s consciousness. It also highlights how sketchbooks are used to record ideas, memories and perceptions, and how they can be used to interconnect them. The sketchbook in effect becoming an interface between the interior and exterior worlds that the artist inhabits. In order to understand how these interconnections operate, sketchbooks are regarded as aesthetic transducers, which support the drawn interrogation of perception and interoception as the artist develops visual forms for ideas that are never quite logical, never totally intuitive, but always a product of the act of drawing.