Sticks & Stones

A number of years ago, while walking through a New England wood in the dead of winter, I caught a glimpse of a structure between the barren tree trunks. It was mostly obscured. In that moment, its size, its boundaries, and even its distance were all impossible to determine. The lighting was extremely flat—the overcast sky erased shadows, and the snow-covered ground blended almost seamlessly with the gray horizon. As I moved toward the structure, the environment created a sense of visual and spatial compression. Distance and scale refused to settle; the form flickered between seeming both near and far, large and small, its dimensional reality collapsing into a flux of perception.

Then I saw a window. A known form within a familiar spatial logic. That single typological marker snapped the ambiguity into coherence. What I had been approaching was merely a small shed on an adjacent property.

The experience left a deep impression on me. I had seen similar effects in drawings many times, but encountering it unlooked-for in real space was entirely different. The stark contrast of the tree trunks against the white ground produced something like the effect of contour rivalry within a drawing: the condition in which a single edge appears to belong to multiple forms at once, forcing the mind to choose between competing spatial organizations. In a drawing, this remains a subtle and mostly pleasurable instability—its space is fictional, and the stakes are low. But in the woods, as the perceptual ground shifted, the sense of spatial compression was simultaneously disorenteing and provocative.

Many artists—and especially architects—have explored the idea of materializing line work or “inhabiting a drawing.” However, the persistent problem remains: a line on a page can occupy multiple readings at once, but once it becomes a three-dimensional element—a pipe, a cable, a rod—it tends to lock into a single spatial reading. The simultaneity collapses. My encounter in the forest forced me to confront the fact that this need not always be so.

The forest, I realized, contains almost every imaginable condition of materialized line work—along with countless others one might never think to draw. Rather than leaping directly into designing and constructing fabricated line structures—an expensive and time-intensive endeavor—this series of drawings, sparked by the experience, began as a study of the found and given conditions of site and material as a nexus between space, form, memory, and perception. What began with a single moment in a winter wood has since expanded to include natural and constructed forms wherever I happen to be. Dilapidated buildings, cast shadows, broken windows, wire, rebar, and scrap material geometries—all become part of an expanding catalogue of perceptual prompts.

What interests me most is how natural or constructed forms generate spatial ambiguities, contradictions, and perceptual instabilities. Drawing is the medium capable of holding these conditions in suspension. What resolves instantly in the real world can be prolonged and dissected on the page; what flickers momentarily can be stabilized long enough to cut, splice, and examine through the lens of projective geometry. In these images, the line is never simply a branch or a shadow. It is a hinge between representation and abstract spatial reasoning—a place where contradictory frameworks can coexist. The drawings become a way to explore that instability, to inhabit it, and to expand what a line can be.