Working Drawing 1[.1]

Working Drawing 1

In the spring of 2020 I began a large drawing project that spanned the two rooms of my small apartment. At roughly sixteen feet long, it was assembled from 4-by-5-foot sheets of paper hung from a steel rail. The question was simple: could a drawing maintain a consistent pictorial space across multiple sheets—and still read as a single spatial whole—even when interrupted by the threshold and offset between rooms?

Unlike a supergraphic that can dominate the reading of architectural space, what I later called Working Drawing One was conceived as a self-contained spatial construct: an image-space that would slip in and out of phase with the apartment’s physical space rather than simply covering it. I designed the drawing’s spatial implications in plan, using the apartment layout as a cue for perceived depth and continuity, rather than treating the subject matter itself as the starting point. (I’ve written more about this design process, which I later called “z-cuts,” here.)

The image developed iteratively. I tested multiple designs in a scale model of the space before settling on one and redrawing it at full scale. In the end, the ideas and techniques that emerged from the process were the project’s most successful outcome. The final work didn’t perform as I hoped: the fixed architecture made free experimentation difficult, and I had already screwed more things into a rental wall than felt wise. But the working method stayed with me, and it became an ongoing experimental process for understanding spatial perception that moves between corporeal space and pictorial space.

For my upcoming exhibition at the Center Art Gallery at Calvin University, one primary new work will be a return to Working Drawing One. The two rooms that once divided the drawing are now only a memory, reintroduced as two steel frameworks that can be arranged according to the original apartment plan. This time, however, the “architecture” can move: the frameworks can be repositioned, unfolded, and reorganized—not only to restage the original conditions, but to turn thresholds and continuity into variables for new experiments.

Apparatus subject matter study via camera obscura

Working Drawing 1[.1]: process schematic of apparatus and image positions

Working Drawing 1[.1]: process schematic of apparatus and image positions