Travel Drawings | 2023 – 2024

These drawings have all been made in a period of much travel and dislocation, often stuffed into my bag, pulled out at the kitchen table, worked on in poor lighting and in between other things. Their making is however not a complete contingency – even as they contain the chance traces of my own movements and the patterns of my life, in them I am also searching and delving for associations with geologic processes.

The tears and damage accrued by the drawings over time run parallel to my research on coalification processes. Through folding, erasing and mark making I am looking for patterns that reflect a connection between geology and life experience, the pressures of which sometimes combine to resist artistic imagination and production. Finding a way to push against those constraints  has led to a series of drawings in which a highly polished and belabored surface becomes visible, a hard fuel emerging from a process of struggle and perseverance.

Each one is a study or a try out, a way to look towards and prepare for larger works that expand on the ideas embedded in these small pieces.

In geology, a fault, instead of being a single clean fracture, may be a zone hundreds or thousands of feet wide. The fault zone consists of numerous interlacing small faults or a confused zone of broken fragments or fractured and metamorphic rocks. These drawings are the start of a series exploring messy in-between spaces. Called Fault Zones, they have been folded together from much larger pieces of paper to create dense, compressed surfaces.