Why do some artists draw upon surfaces with pre-existent categories of the sign or what the author calls “expendable surfaces of inscription”. These surfaces are one of the mediate modes of the author’s model of Transitional Multi-Mode practices. The expendability of the surface on which the artist draws serves to postpone premature closure because open to destruction or eventual survival, and as such are what Winnicott, in his psychoanalytic theory of object relations, calls a “Transitional object” that serves to generate a “potential space” between the inside and the outside that, following Winnicott, is the source of all subsequent cultural and creative experience. Following both Lacan on the “object a” and Bracha Ettinger on the matrixial we explore an additional reason for the artist’s choice of the expendable surface of inscription as a response that wells up from the unconscious in the interweaving and condensation of the pre-existent signs and those that are superimposed upon it. In the context of secondary and tertiary education the use of the expendable surface of inscription enables the student to work with indeterminacy, with non-finito forms of signification, and with a provisionality that allays the anxiety and intellectual uncertainty of forestalling premature closure. Following Stables on language acquisition our research has revealed that drawing in dialogue with the other is the way the artist and student acquires the use of the expendable surface of inscription. Eventually, the student’s choice of the surface may provide access to an unconscious response to the arrangement of signifiers on the surface of inscription that corresponds to Stables’ notion of the sign as an “event” rather than a substitute.