I am accustomed to cities and the certainty of knowing where I am on the grid, so it is always disconcerting to walk through a hilly rural landscape and notice that a particular landmark may be at one moment ahead and another far to the left. If the overall direction of the path or river or cliff is known I hold fast to the illusion that the direction should be constant. I think part of the satisfaction of long hikes comes when I let go of the expectation of predictability. In that sense a country walk can be similar to a dream.
You could argue that the way we perceive and remember physical space is more a function of mind than of the exterior reality. Otherwise how could we dream in exquisite detail of a room or building of which we have no conscious memory?
It's not unusual to dream of architecture. One odd characteristic of my dreams is that I am rarely aware of how one room is situated in relation to the whole, or more to the point I am not aware of the whole at all, and yet space is clearly important to my dreaming self. One of my first memories of my grandmothers’ house was a dark stairway to the attic. The stairway itself was impossibly steep and curved for no obvious reason. As a child I had no mental plan of the house and the way that stairwell fit in the exterior shell, so anything was possible.
Recently I have been working on drawings of public spaces. Airports and train stations, especially, are unreal spaces, floating between worlds. The pattern of traffic and the function of individual spaces that we see now is but one of many layers of pattern and function. Many of the odd, seemingly purposeless spaces could be compared to discarded tools from a previous era, unused but still visible. The spaces are occupied only momentarily by the passengers, so the drawings may include people when the social interaction, or lack of such, is a part of the narrative.
One drawing from this series was inspired by photos of the powerful and rich taken by Erich Salomon between the world wars. The viewer of his photographs is clearly the outsider.
The new series of drawings is a continuation of my interest in the way we perceive physical space. I want to draw what I perceive, not as an engineer who has an overall map and a cognitive grasp of the space, but like the walker who overcomes that expectation of predictability.
All of these drawings are done by coating prepared paper with encaustic and scratching through the surface, so the image is made by uncovering rather than adding.
