Exploratory Data visualisation

I return often to the silent labour of the Perseverance rover, moving across the surface of Mars, collecting and sealing fragments of another world into titanium tubes. These samples wait there now, suspended in a future that may never arrive. The mission to retrieve them remains uncertain. Evidence of life beyond Earth may already exist, meticulously gathered and carefully stored, yet forever out of reach.

These drawings emerge from that distance, from the gap between detection and understanding. Using scan drawing techniques alongside a kind of sgraffito technique, I work into pastel-covered paper with a jeweller’s drill, removing material to reveal the white ground beneath. Each incision is both an act of excavation and inscription, a mark that is made by taking away.

What remains resembles a form of data visualisation, but one that resists translation. Constellations of punctures, fragments, and traces suggest a system without providing access to it. A record without a language.

These works inhabit a space between signal and noise, where meaning is implied but never fully grasped, and where the possibility of knowledge persists as a kind of distant, unresolved echo.