Support the Vision: A Glimpse into Drawing Research & Alchemy
Get the slides from Mat’s talks exploring the roots of consciousness, symbolic landscapes, and the primal spark of meaning-making. These PDFs are both souvenirs of thought and seeds for reflection, offered as a gesture of connection and mutual support.
This document contains both the slides and the extensive bibliography
On Ochre, Graphite and Gold: Drawing the Divine and Tracing Consciousness
Saturday 8th November 2025 at St Anne's College, Oxford
Speaker: Matilde Gliubich Tomat (Bangor University)
This presentation weaves together arts-based research, somatic awareness, and paleophenomenological inquiry to explore drawing as an alchemical act. Beginning with insights from my MRes research, On Encountering the Divine in the Act of Drawing, I revisit performative drawing as a ritual of transformation, where the body becomes a vessel and the mark a trace of becoming. The drawing process is approached not merely as artistic expression or psychological gesture, but as a methodological threshold: a mode of inquiry into the earliest layers of consciousness and human meaning-making.
Drawing becomes, in this context, an embodied technology of presence, a somatic invocation that catalyses transformation in both the artist and the space. This alchemical process unfolds between the horizontality of immanence [the body grounded in place, gesture, material] and the verticality of transcendence [the arrival of insight, symbol, or presence]. The simple act of graphite moving across white paper echoes the alchemical movement from nigredo to albedo, from opacity and potential to clarity and illumination.
In linking this with my current doctoral research in paleophenomenology [a framework I am developing to investigate the emergence of human awareness through embodied interaction with ancient sites], I propose that the act of marking, both in contemporary practice and in Palaeolithic contexts, constitutes a trans-temporal alchemical gesture: not merely symbolic, but generative. Whether ochre on a cave wall or graphite on paper, the act of leaving a trace transforms both self and world.
This presentation argues for a rethinking of drawing as a phenomenological method and alchemical ritual. It is a gesture that spans millennia, bridging the personal, ancestral, and archetypal. In the moment of the mark, we glimpse the convergence of the seen and unseen, and matter becoming meaning.
***
I am very grateful to the London Arts-Based Research Centre LABRC for giving me this opportunity to present my practice-led drawing research.