Hand drawn?

Here are a few photos from Saturday in the gallery. I had a really interesting day with many visitors coming along to chat to me about my residency work and the exhibition.

A few new sketches from last week using spirograph and free hand lines

One lady in particular came back for a second viewing of the show as she knew I'd be there working on my new drawings. She specifically came back to ask me one question in particular:  'Have any of your drawings been made by a machine?'. 

Well the simple answer to this is no!

however this has raised some interesting questions about the hand drawn line, my processes and could really have an impact on future works. 

For example, I consider a lot of the processes I work with at the moment are very organic in their approach and outcome; they transform, evolve, grow and tend to pay a particular interest in repetition through a singular mark/gesture using pen or graphite. The marks are subtle, but repeated thousands of times - they create a complex system of from growing abstract motives that are intuitively constructive.  It's interesting how hand manipulated media using such processes can be considered to have been made by machine - often interpreted as precision, exact, no room for error etc. Is it really so important for me that viewers instantly recognise a hand drawn line? or is it a vital part of the viewing that a person wonders how can the artist have done this by hand? 

The reaction from the lady will probably answer my question - she was astounded to hear that the work is hand drawn and it had completely changed her perception and understanding of my work.