The activity at the core of psychoanalysis, the talking cure, is listening out for meaning buried in the unconscious and attending to matter recalled in the preconscious. Freud recognised the artist as a person engaged in exposing the unconscious and in 1913 even went as far as to consider that artists were the only people in society active in retaining an ‘omnipotence of thought’. Freud lived a long life and said a lot of things however I would argue that many artists are engaged in trying to analyse their individual unconscious’s and drawings in particular sculptors’ drawings reflect a bubbling up of the unconscious into the pre-conscious. The fluid act of rapid drawing creates a net with which to catch the repressed.

Louise Bourgeois famously called drawings ‘thought feathers’ meanings to be grasped before they fly away. Have you ever had that moment of clarity when an important idea comes to mind from an unknown place only to be distracted and it vanish? This is why listening with a sketchbook is vital. The act of drawing as listening to something unknown so as to not to forget its having been revealed marks an interdigitation between the unconscious and the preconscious. These drawings, that may very well seem the scribblings of a fool outside the art world, they sign a place between the illegible and the intelligible to form a preconscious landscape.