Technical Drawing (Figures)
found diagrams, ink on paper
Fig. 164
This series investigates technical drawing as a visual language, using an early-1900s textbook I found tucked away in a used bookstore. I was struck by how unchanged the techniques felt, compared to the digital methods I use in my commercial design work. The project is an attempt to reclaim a technique designed to subsume human drafters into the language of the machine. Each drawing begins with a figure abstracted from the original textbook (left); I create a drawn response (right) to that example. “Fig. 164” is an abstract response, using visual cues from the original to create a sense of balance and harmony. I’m hoping to use this drawing as a healing act, reasserting the biological, organic, animate life within this mechanistic, industrial language.
Fig. 111
“Fig. 111,” from the same series, is a more figurative response. I used duplicates of the original structure and the same single-point perspective to set up an implied narrative, a spatial and temporal relationship between these imaginary objects. I was struck by the rigidity of the original’s orthographic projection – the reduction of a 3D object into planar views – and felt a desire to puncture those hard planes, to trespass across the invasive boundaries of “section” and “plan." What emerged intuitively was a series of mythic toxins – a viper, a poison apple, and water hemlock. Each allude to specific human stories – Eurydice’s untimely death, the biblical fall from grace, Socrates’s forced suicide. But they also each represent a more humble relationship with the animate forces of the non-human world than is standard in the post-industrial west: we are not always in control, we’re not at the top of some imaginary hierarchy, we are not invincible.