Using frottage as a creative method
Art for wellbeing
A lot of what creative methods for wellbeing is trying to do is to is to bypass those thoughts of ‘I’m not an artist’ or ‘I can’t do this’ so that you can rest your mind and be in the moment.
Frottage, or rubbing, is a great technique for this. The artist’s hand is intentionally subordinated to the texture of the material world. The resulting image is therefore dictated by chance as much as by choice, causing forms, which the poet and painter Henri Michaux termed apparitions, to emerge onto the surface of the paper rather than being consciously composed. This was right up the surrealist movement’s alley, where frottage gained a real following.
But we can recreate the movement ourselves with some pastels, crayons or charcoal.
(source: MoMA)
Th word frottage is from the French ‘frotter’, meaning to rub, but it is an an ancient technique. In ancient China, ink rubbing developed as a convenient method of making reproductions. The oldest surviving rubbing is Fountain Memory from the Tang dynasty, found in Cave 17 at Dunhuang, however the origin of ink rubbing is thought to date back to even earlier times. (source: The Flat Files)
It is such a versatile medium. I love when individuals create their rubbings, and combine them into a collage. In practice, artists often gather numerous frottages from a variety of surfaces, think tiles, planks, wallpaper, and then “add sections of different rubbings to the same sheet to build up a network of marks”. These collected textural sheets can be cut or torn apart and reassembled into a composition or a landscape collage. This could be done to create a group image.
(Source: Joshua Nava Art from Pinterest)
As a technique, it invites participants to create, perhaps outside of what ‘art’ is defined as. Anyone can use frottage to explore the nature of the artistic mark, the role of chance, touch, and even research. Whether utilised to capture the shifting grain of wood or the etched texture of an urban façade, frottage remains a powerful, adaptable tool for generating involuntary images that simultaneously document and transcend the physical world.
Want to experiment with frottage as a group? What a great team building activity! Contact us to hear more about a one hour frottage session or your group.
