Ruins
Departures. Remains. Ruins. An archaeology of arrival.
Recent drawings have begun without a clear subject. Some emerge from the white of an empty moment — that point at which the need to draw confronts the blankness of paper and the hand reaches for its first gesture. Others begin from photographs or sketches — of a window, a road, a landscape, a face. But these images, already seen, arrive on paper too completely. The drawings become closed before they have properly begun.
Rather than abandoning these drawings, I work against them and amongst their ruin: rubbing back, erasing, scoring into the surface with fingernails or with an etching needle, layering charcoal and lifting it away again. So much is waiting.
What drives the process forward is the moment a drawing survives this disturbance and something unexpected begins to emerge from beneath the surface. At that point I stop drawing what I thought I was drawing and begin instead to follow the forms that appear within the drawing itself. Dissatisfaction, destruction and repeated revision call forward something unintended.
Because traces of earlier states remain embedded in the paper, the drawings develop a kind of archaeology. Earlier images are never fully erased but remain partially buried, hovering in and out of visibility. Marks become both descriptive and physical — scratched, incised, excavated — carrying with them the memory of previous forms and joining the one to the other.
These works are therefore less concerned with depiction than with emergence. Through cycles of layering, erasure and excavation, something unforeseen appears and, for a moment, holds.
Figure with Window
Charcoal on paper, 50 × 38 cm, 2026