What the Magpie Found
My current practice revolves around collecting and documenting observations from my life and translating them into a material form. By using charcoal on paper or paint on canvas, the image shifts from an optical registration to a material presence. The image is not reproduced, but re-experienced through drawing and the physical gestures of the finger and hand.
In my thinking about images and perception, the distinction between seeing and looking is important. Seeing can be understood as a continuous and largely automatic process. We constantly receive visual information from the world around us, which can be seen as fleeting. Looking, however, implies a more focused form of attention.
I try to be aware of little moments in mundane scenes, like a fresh toothpaste stain in a black sink that mirrors the light bulb reflecting in that same black. They are simple recordings, but important moments to train the eye and brain to be more aware of my surroundings.
This matters because it shifts me from passively existing within my environment to actively witnessing and understanding it. It positions me not just as someone who moves through spaces, but as someone who registers, frames, and resees them. This creates an urgency to stay attentive, and to consciously acknowledge and share the world around me.
During the process of making, I search for a particular energy and urgency that solidify within the material. For this reason, right now I work with charcoal: a direct and tactile medium that reveals every gesture. Using my fingers, I create smudges that suggest figuration, while the material itself remains visible. Because colour is less self-evident to me due to my colourblindness, the working of light and dark takes on a greater role. The white of the paper functions as light; I add only shadow.
My work engages closely with photography, drawing not only on its source material but also on its way of seeing: attending to captured moments, framing, focus, contrast, and cropping. This logic forms a point of departure from which the material interpretation starts.
I regard an installation of drawings on my studio wall as an extension of this process: a fragmentary and associative, yet consistent, visual mode of thinking in which images resonate alongside one another and relationships unfold through the act of looking.
I choose specific images because they hold something I cannot quite resolve or name, but that I am nevertheless moved by. Something that keeps asking to be looked at. Making these things is not really about understanding them. It is an attempt at understanding, yes, but more than that it is a way of holding something that moved me and acknowledging that it did. I do not want to summon the rain. But I do want to draw it.
