# Narrative: inquiry

## The prompt (Russell, kept intact)
"Charcoal drawing. A figure in a field both part of and apart from her surroundings--one hand tethered to an open bird cage, the other absent or resisting. The cage is less prison than pattern."

## Subject and treatment (what the prompt fixes)
Subject: a woman in a field; one hand tethered to an open bird cage; the other hand absent or resisting. Treatment: charcoal.
Claims the prompt makes that a drawing must show, not caption: she is both part of and apart from the field; the cage is "less prison than pattern".

## What we are trying to discover
How can a drawing make one figure belong to a field and stand apart from it at once, through what is visible (edges, marks, values), and what would make a cage read as pattern rather than as a prison or a prop?
Working hypotheses, none assumed:
- belonging and apartness as edges: where her contour is lost in the field she belongs; where it is hard she is apart;
- pattern as a shared mark: if the cage's bars are the same kind of mark as the grass, the cage becomes part of the field's pattern, not an object of story;
- the tether as the one continuous line in a drawing of broken ones;
- "absent" as something the drawing does (a lost hand, a cropped arm, an unfinished passage), not something the figure does;
- the bird: the prompt does not ask for one (see the default map).

## The default (s0_default/DEFAULT_MAP.md)

## Method
As for the still life: inquiry; set 1 (six distinct organizations); critique (habits, promising relations, caption-only ideas); set 2 with the strongest counterexample to the favourite; set 3 if useful; a passage of work with the fitting tool; critique of the return and of the intention; an argued Hold.

## Tools for native thumbnails
hand/stage.py (new): an authored stage with an articulated figure (capsule mannequin with a dress, joint targets for the hands), a cage (bars, rings, dome, an open door, a hook), a tether (a sagging line), a bird, grass drawn over the render, one light with cast shadows. Hands (Kollwitz charcoal) draws the value study.