Map drawings

2012 ongoing

The process of layering small, discreet marks in my drawings gradually gave rise to the organic emergence of map-like structures, forms that conceptually link the extremely small with the extremely large. Around 2012, I began to notice cellular patterns appearing within these formations, especially as I developed a drawing process I refer to as scan drawing. This technique involves working systematically with varying rules, in this case from the top of the page to the bottom, drawing horizontal bands and filling them with vertical lines of varying density - an approach that mimics the scanning motion of imaging technologies.

For my 2015 exhibition Surface Detail, I focused on the idea of scientific imaging instruments observing and interpreting hypothetical extrasolar planets. The layered watercolours in these works evoke chemical and molecular traces detected by such instruments, imagining a kind of speculative data visualisation from worlds beyond our own. The drawings become sites of translation between mark and meaning, scale and structure, observation and imagination.