‘I’ve drawn, like, someone who was the world’: drawings as embodied gestures of lived yoga experience

ABSTRACT

There have been strong calls to develop the study of sensory embodied scholarship in sport and physical culture that is open for all academic fields to consider. Work so far relies largely upon the sensory intelligence of the researcher in auto/ethnographic approaches and drawing as a traditional arts-based visual methods approach is rare. This paper seeks to address this situation by offering an original example of a participant-generated drawing methodology to explore lived experience of yoga. To do so we utilise phenomenology to frame our position on the mind-body-world relationship as it relates to the goals and practice of yoga and of drawing as an embodied gesture. We offer visual-led interpretations of drawings produced by participants after yoga practice, of composition strategies and the verbal explanations they invite. The drawings created new empirical and methodological insights into how the environment or world is attended to by yoga practitioners as part of a sensory emplaced experience, and opened up new dialogues and exchanges of data between the fields of physical culture and art and of the challenges of investigating lived sensory experience in this way. Our findings provide an original example of how drawings and arts-based knowledge might be incorporated into a sensory embodied research agenda in sport and physical culture. More bridging work between the arts and physical culture is needed to develop methodologies for use with novice drawer participants.

KEYWORDS:

• Yoga
• senses
• embodiment
• phenomenology
• drawings
• art

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the yoga practitioner participants for their time and drawings. We also thank the reviewers and Andrew Sparkes for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carly Stewart

Dr. Carly Stewart is a Principle Academic in the Department of Sport and Physical Activity, Bournemouth University. Her research interests cohere around the body, the sociology of embodiment and auto/biographical research methods in sport and physical activity.

Martyn Woodward

Dr. Martyn Woodward is a Senior Lecturer in the Cardiff School of Art, Cardiff Metropolitan University. His research explores the relationship between human experience, the created/designed world of artefacts and the ‘non-human’ world of matter and materials.

Rochelle Gough

Rochelle Gough is a former MA student in the Cardiff School of Sport, Cardiff Metropolitan University.