Drawing

Drawing with Tape: Part two

Find below a few more tapes that can be bought on line. The fact that tape can be thought of as very long drawings means that certain types of associations gravitate around this common commercial product, from miniature roads to playful games about measurement. The idea I really like, which is the screw head tape; a tape designed to stick two surfaces together but to make the join look as if it was a screw fixed joint, is a simple illusion, but in its very uselessness it becomes poetic. The same designers (Richard Shed and Sam Johnson) came up with Dovetail tape which is conceptually witty but not quite as poetic. 

Centre Tape

Tape measure tape

Screw head tape

Dovetail tape

It's not just designers that have used tape in interesting ways, the architect Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, has had to use tape to draw with because of trying to make drawings in a very wet climate.

Studio Mumbai: Saat Rasta: Mahindra Unit Tape drawing, 2013. Pencil and tape on wood

Bijoy Jain explains that tape drawing is for him about ‘adapting to place’. The idea of drawing with tape on a plywood sheet originating from a response to constant, heavy rainfall and the need to find an alternative to drawings printed on paper, which could not withstand the conditions on site. The tape drawing contains information about the fabrication and workings of the unit’s roof edge, building components, layering of materials, and their proportion. The contrast in colours and grain of both the tape and wood also lends a tactile quality to the drawn section. In this modest architectural drawing, practicality and visual expression are conjoined, as line is activated by the seams between each piece of tape, in such a way that it suggests the material properties of the final building materials. Bijoy Jain goes on to state that the Saatrasta-Mahindra tape drawing also conveys a narrative of place and process and that building design needs to be rooted in a context that also includes the way in which architects design and draw.

Bijoy Jain has this to say about his design process; 'The way I practice, architecture works both on a personal as well as universal level. If we think that what fundamentally makes me, also fundamentally makes everyone else, then it means that we are all deeply connected'. 

Tape as a connecting material is something that is not too far away from the material that wrapped mummies in ancient Egypt, and of course before we forget, was also the stuff that Maurizio Cattelan used for his piece, 'A Perfect Day', the 1999 work in which he duct-taped his gallerist Massimo De Carlo to a wall.