Devices - or any contrivance designed to mediate the artist's default mark making gestures - need not remove consciousness or intellect from the drawing process. Like a true artificial limb, they employ the pragmatic and the mechanistic to harness reasoned thought and human impulse. The finished drawing can be seen as the pure expression of system or machine as mediated by the artist's consciously imposed strictures, while, at the same time, the system implicitly challenges the democracy and meritocracy of drawing, shedding new light on romantic notions of 'the muse' and lending a provocative ambiguity to the authorial hand.

Catalogue essay to accompany Remote Control exhibition at Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham. The group exhibition curated by Deborah Dean and Helen Jones brought together nine drawing based artists that use or relate their practice to automation and drawing devices. The essay contextualised mechanical interventions within contemporary drawing practice allowing us to dispense with ideas of innate ability, of giftedness - and justify a lack of responsibility. By foregrounding the artifice of drawing, these systems make a virtue of the disparity between the envisioned and the articulated.