Titre : What Drawing Makes Imperceptible: Attention, Bodily Awareness, and Immersion in Drawing Practice. A personnel account by an artist 

Auteurs : Juliette Savaëte,  

Revue : Art and Science 

Numéro : Issue 4 

Volume : 10 

Date : 2026/11/2 

DOI : 10.21494/ISTE.OP.2026.1503 

ISSN : 2515-8767 

Résumé : When I run, my attention accompanies the manifestations of my body: changes in breathing, muscular tension, the onset of fatigue, and the adjustments required to sustain movement. When I draw, this relationship changes. Although my body remains fully engaged in drawing, certain sensations cease to occupy an identifiable place in my conscious experience. Hunger, fatigue, and muscular tension may go unnoticed during the activity, only to become perceptible, sometimes with striking intensity, when drawing stops. This change is neither intentional nor deliberate. I do not decide to divert my attention away from my body, nor can I identify the moment at which certain sensations become less accessible. It is only upon leaving the drawing activity that I retrospectively become aware of what had escaped my attention. Drawing on this recurrent experience, this article examines the relationships between attentional engagement, immersion in artistic practice, and bodily awareness. It adopts a practice-based artistic research approach grounded in the reflective analysis of situations experienced during my drawing practice, brought into dialogue with research on attention, interoception, perception and action, and cognitive absorption. The hypothesis explored is that intense attentional engagement in drawing may alter conscious access to certain bodily signals without necessarily interrupting their physiological processing. This hypothesis remains exploratory: the reported experience does not make it possible to distinguish a change in the intensity of sensations from a change in their conscious accessibility. The interruption of drawing provides the principal point of observation. It reveals a contrast between bodily experience during the activity and the experience that follows it. This temporal discrepancy also raises a methodological difficulty: how can a variation in bodily awareness be observed without the attention required for its observation altering the phenomenon itself? This research does not claim to establish a causal mechanism or to generalize from an individual experience. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate how a situation arising from artistic practice can generate a scientific question concerning the relationships between attention, creative gesture, and bodily perception. 

Éditeur : ISTE OpenScience