Interview With Luca Massimo Barbero

From Drawing Space, MACRO, Rome, Italy, 2010

Luca Massimo Barbero: I should like to start this conversation of ours, ‘over time and distance,’ with a reflection on how important it may be for visitors to MACRO who are seeking the substance of your exploration of the possible in your words, images and signs. The creation of some works, as well as your way of approaching both technique and materials, has led to an astonishing and constant tension between development and consistency. It finds potential expression in one particular point along the way, and this needs to be built up into an exhibition that both respects your process and study of drawing, and that can be a narrative taken up by our public. Most visitors are of the younger generations, and they would love this story to be told by the author himself and shared with them.

The extraordinary focus of your thoughts, together with the spread of the perceptible and consistent diversity of your work in sculpture, makes it possible today to put even greater attention (in the form of an exhibition for the public) on the incredible and yet constant, daily progress of your drawing. Drawing is a very powerful and constantly present line of thought that has always run alongside your creation of sculpture, at times intersecting with it. You yourself have referred to drawing as ‘a kind of magic, a kind of necessity.’ Ever since your early days, in your travels - and especially in your fundamental experience in India - drawing accompanied you primarily as a sort of diary description of places and of the people you met, and then it entered overwhelmingly into your work. This was back in the very early 1980s, when the dimensions of the sheet and support were considerable, autonomous and significant, just like their subjects.

Since then, drawing has not just been an exercise (art critics have long been questioning themselves about sculptors’ drawings) for it has become an authentic ‘thought diagram’ and a system for exploring every idea and independent reasoning. This exhibition includes three works made between 1981 and 1983, including Mansion of 1982. They are works in which charcoal, pigment and oil are used in an intense investigation into the human figure, its ‘selfcontainment,’ and the way it can be filled with form. Similarly, we find that the traces become flowing points of conjunction and contact between anatomical parts, which are intended and drawn as places of energy and of the senses. In some works of the same period, such as Germinal (1982) and Mould (1981), it is a dense black material that constitutes an ideal substance in which the human figure is suspended, contained and almost protected, while also being suffocated. It is the start of an immersion into a world thought of in terms of matter, line, and light. Could you tell us about those particular moments in your drawing, in the very early 1980s, which then became the theme of an exhibition in New York in 1985?¹ And, at the same time, is there a context of ideas in which these profound drawings on paper can be linked to the nascent presence of the human figure in your sculpture of those years?

Antony Gormley: During that time, in the early 1980s, after leaving postgraduate college at the Slade and setting up house with the woman who was to become my wife, space was at a premium: we had been housed in very tight conditions in a few rooms in King’s Cross by a housing association that had taken over the squat in which we had originally lodged and all of these early drawings were made in the first floor room; a space of about 6 by 4.5 by 4 metres high with windows facing north and east where all activities happened. Looking back to those years, I think this was really the beginning of trying both to make drawing substantial and to somehow locate the inscription of an idea in a field which had mass and weight. I really can’t remember how or why I started using charcoal and oil pigment, but I guess it was for many reasons. I loved the smell, the substantial thickness and the literal weight of flat oil paint. The drawings were made directly on the wall with the paper pinned to it and the making of the drawings, often clumsy, was very physical and alert, done from a standing position. When I think of these early drawings of a bowl, a vase, sex with angels, sex in a tent and the early exploration of the body as a cave or dark vessel, I don’t think the sculpture would have been possible without these drawings: they are literally the foundation of my sculpture.

It’s hard for me, looking back now, thirty years later, to remember exactly the sequence of the events. But I cannot dissociate it from the loss of my big studio. Twenty friends and I had squatted in a factory on King’s Cross Road, and we finally lost this in 1979/80. Suddenly all of the space that I had had to make things physically was removed, and there are very few objects left from that period: Full Bowl (1977-78), the first Land, Sea And Air (1977-79), and so on. But these drawings were also the beginning of investigating the body as site and the sites of the body, both in terms of shelter and landscape and in terms of the internal conditions of the body, sometimes identified by internal organs (somewhat simplified or codified as brain, eyeballs, lungs, heart, kidneys, testicles) and sometimes just imagined. And I think the untitled drawing of the hypertrophy of the brain (Untitled, 1981) is one of these attempts to evoke the internal sensation of a bodily function that is at the same time both a thought and the confounding of thought. The body in some senses renders all things dumb because it is itself a palpable proposal. And I think the drawing became the vehicle both for dealing with the body not simply as a closed subject of representation but as a ground for exploration, and for trying to find ways of conveying these kinds of palpable or embodied thinking.

So for me this large untitled head that in a way talks about the sensorium but also the way that perceptions (whether they be sight, smell or taste) are embodied as sensations, rather than as images or ideas, is a kind of manifesto of my life’s work from then on. I still see this drawing on a daily basis; it is on the wall in the studio that is still in King’s Cross (we haven’t moved far, have we!). And I think that in a diagramatic way, but also in a sculptural way, in its crude physicality, it conveys the condition of the body as embodied thought, sensation or perception.

As I cast my mind’s eye back to that time I can remember the overwhelming smell of turpentine and linseed oil. The drawings would irradiate the room with this strong, physical odour. And in a sense this small room became a pressure chamber in which these investigations of body as space were realised but then themselves became the context for new notions. And it was in this very room that the very first moulding of my body took place, in a foetal position, with my body covered in a heavy layer of vaseline and on top of that plaster and scrim, from which I was eventually cut out, with the loss of much body hair. And that moment came after another very important drawing which you already mentioned called Mould (1981), in which this moment of self-burial and removal from the world of action, perception and freedom (in other words, the laboratory of my work) is first pictured.

I think in many ways the foundation of my art started within a very tight domestic ground. I had had my adventures in other cultures and three years of travelling in mind and body. I’d had five years at art school investigating ways, means and thinking about art, but the real crucible in which my work arose was in the sexual and intimate domestic zone of a life suddenly grounded in purpose and in a relationship with another human being. The birth of my first child, my first sculpture exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the creation of these drawings all happened in 1981, in the context of a sudden concentration of my field of activity. I cannot remember now where these early drawings of bodies and houses came in the evolution of my thinking or imagery, but certainly in the exhibition at the Whitechapel in the summer of 1981 there were no bodies. And yet in 1981 we made Mould, the first of the lead body-cases (Three Ways: Mould, Hole And Passage, 1981-82). And in many ways the lead acts similarly to the flat oil pigment in trying to substantialise questions about space, or the relationship between inside and outside. And I think this move to working almost exclusively in the insulated, saturnine, melancholic material of lead complements this turning inward to the primal conditions of life and looking at the basis for existence. It was as if after these years of experiment and theoretical investigation I had now landed on a ground and the ground was simply to do with life, death, survival, man, woman, house, brain, penis, heart and the relationships between what goes on inside the head and in the space outside it.

I still think of those early drawings as combining a level of investigation with the wish to find a diagramatic or easily understood shorthand depiction, since I was no longer interested in verisimilitude. But also present in these works is something that I gained from my love of the work of Richard Serra or Ad Reinhardt: a desire for absolutism, a wish to make incommensurable or infinite extendability somehow substantial, physical, present and felt.

I think I felt that in making these drawings I was also testing myself in terms of what satisfaction, reassurances or disturbances might be available or might be demanded of the viewer in encountering this kind of inscription. I wanted the drawing to be absolute, immediate, but at the same time to have a certainty almost like that of Fermat’s Theorem,² a kind of concentrated proposition, while at the same time displaying all the workings. And I think this demanded a recalibration of my own reflexivity in relation to my work, as is reflected in the that way I wrote about the drawing in the catalogue for the Salvatore Ala exhibition that you are referring to.

LM B: For a brief but intense period of time, in the drawings we see spaces demarcated by lines that schematically suggest an indoor perspective. Inside, the figures perceptibly take hold of their ‘being in space’ and, at the same time, of their ‘being space’ itself. Almost fatefully, drawings like Field or Tree (both 1984) are the precursors of some of your later studies, but they also introduced the theme of place and space/figure, which is constantly developed, providing the measure of your work. Your biographies tell us about your early studies of anthropology; what, on the other hand, is your relationship with architecture as a possible (or impossible) space for man? Considering drawing too, how do you interact with the architecture of an interior, and how do you intervene with sculpture in spaces that range from museums to great urban and natural landscapes? Is drawing a possible part of this process?

AG: In coming to the end of the first period of my life I returned - in a kind of gnostic tale of return - to the intimate, finding myself in a new home, but not that of my parents. And in this new context of intimacy I tried to find a place, function and indeed justification for art, which I had always considered to be an exercise in investigation and the testing of boundaries. The return to the notion of body was not really one that I had a great deal of choice in. I had come to the end of an investigation of art as art and I no longer wanted to make art about art, but about life, about being, about existence itself. This return to the cave and the body as cave was a very conscious return to the first conditions, you could say the first homonid condition. And an attempt to start, in the manner of Descartes’ Discourse On Method, with an investigation of what we know; a retreat from belief and wishful thinking and a concentration on the relationship between what we can empirically prove through touch, what we can perceptually perceive through vision, and what we can conceptually conceive through thought.

The spaces of the body: a bed, a bath, a tent, a hut, a home, a beach, a mountain, a lake, a river, a sea, a sky, a horizon … a house, a house as a second body, a house in which other bodies live, a house in which other bodies have other thoughts, a space to be acknowledged and tested: Field and Tree (both 1984). I think that the exploration of space and place, of the notion of architecture and of shelter, of human habitat (starting first with the biological and ending with the constructed; the second body, that of architecture), together with the placing of the body in the elements, the consideration of the internal dynamic of the body as being made up of elements, and of pathetic fallacy (the idea that the humours of the body and the weather are fundamentally connected) is a leitmotif throughout the work. Through the membrane of the skin and the membrane of architecture I am continually attempting to make connections between the infinite extension of the mind and the infinite extension of space; cosmic space.

Architecture is a necessary filter for our experience and for the framing of our perceptual world but, like the skin of the body, I think that it has to be tested, expanded, rendered porous. In defining the body as a place and finding the place of the body for sculpture, I have attempted to investigate all spaces, from the urban to the most extremely isolated. And in doing so I wish to liberate sculpture from its dependency on the second body: the body of a building, the sheltered roof and window spaces of our homes and institutions. I profoundly believe that when placed in the changing light of the day and night, in rain and shine and in the changing seasons of the year, sculpture acts in a way that it cannot when confined to internal spaces. And I believe that the inertia of sculpture begins to have meaning and potency when placed within the changing conditions of the elemental world.

Having said all of that, architecture remains the most potent test site for sculpture and, as an example of a humanly built thing that stands in and with the world, a functional model for how art can can be integrated as an imaginative extension of the needs of the body. However, when I use a room I do not want to take either its orientation or its fixedness for granted, and this is why I have consistently tested the context of architectural space, firstly with works like Learning To Think (1991) or Edge (1985), which attach themselves to ceiling and wall as if they were the floor, and subsequently with works such as Lost Horizon I (2008), the work in which 32 iron body forms were placed on the walls, floors and ceilings of a space. All of these works attempt to liberate the determination of architecture to make a fixed point and to allow architecture to become a floating signifier, an uncertain space, or even a disorienting space where the Kantian subjectives of up, down, front, back, left, right are undermined. And to provoke a sense of the space of a room not being fixed and acknowledging the fact that of the room is actually moving; at the equator the earth is turning on its own axis at 1670 km/hour and the whole planet is orbiting around the sun at 1,800 km/hour. So in placing the sculpture in an elemental world, whether on the side of the Empire State Building (Event Horizon, New York, 2010) or in the vastness of an alpine valley (Horizon Field, August 2010 / April 2012), I try to expose the vulnerability, intimacy and uncertainty of the individual’s position within a wider world. And, by putting them into orbit (as, for instance, in Drawn 2000-07), I try to undermine the certainty of architectural spaces as addressed locations.

LM B: As a brief introduction to this ‘conversation over time and distance,’ you suggest that drawing ‘is about getting materials to interact on a surface.’ What are these materials - the substances that you have come across over these years, and that you have used in your drawings? The hardly coincidental importance of the choice of these materials, of their surfaces, and their belonging to life, and to nature: when was it that you experimented most in this sense?

AG: I think right from the beginning, even at school, I was always interested in observing the behaviour of substances, one to the other (oil to water, egg to the juice of a raspberry, for instance) and then of substances to surface (the degree to which they sat on, or in, the absorbent surface of paper). Right from the beginning I was never interested in colour for its own sake, but rather in how a substance that leaves stains would have not only its own particular hue but also its own emotional content. I started with linseed oil, pigment, turpentine and charcoal and moved to exploring all kinds of other ‘real’ materials - earth, milk, egg, blood and semen - and all the forms of drawing a line, whether it was with a pencil, a piece of lead, a silverpoint or a burin. And this forms a kind of parellel alchemical laboratory experiment.

To what extent do you have to image something, if there is substantial evidence of it? I have always been amazed by the oracular. Not that I think of my works as being particularly oracular. But I think the process of making them is such, as, for example, with the ancient Chinese reading of the cracks on the scapula of oxen, the Babylonian investigation of the liver or the English habit of looking at the leaves of tea left in a cup; in sum, the reading of signs in random associations of matter: stains, scratches, cracks, scuff marks. These inscriptions in matter that are the register of real events are at the same time both forensic and oracular. And I see this kind of investigation of random chance occurences as a lens through which one might look at the alignment of other events. I think of drawing itself as a form of enchantment or going ‘into the zone.’ In some senses what is depicted or achieved in terms of immersion in this dream-state is less significant. Certainly in the early years this was a primary zone of escaping from the conditions of logical mentation into somewhere more open and more dangerous whilst at the same time, as you say, evoking the claustrophobia of an embodied mind.

LM B: Many have written about the relationship between figure and environment, place and nature. An unexcitingly direct question: in your work, in your drawings, and throughout your artistic career, what is your idea about landscape and how do you relate to it?

AG: I began by talking about the places of the body and I ended up in that list extending to the horizon. I described Number 13, Frederick Street, London WC1, where these first charcoal oil and pigment drawings were made, but the almost direct opposite to that environment was the exposure to extreme landscapes of great age but also wide distance. And in those early years (1980-82) Vicken and I went north to Argyll, to a particular peninsular, Ardpatrick, opposite the islands of Jura, Isla and Colonsay, out in the Irish sea. It’s a landscape of long-standing inhabitation, with megalithic monuments from the early farmers from around 3000 BC, and with a single wooden hut at the point, held down by steel ropes to protect it against gales. This landscape was, if you like, the complementary natural opposite to the compressed, intimate zone of King’s Cross. It was a world of wind, the sound of sea-birds, the smell of rotting kelp and salt, the sound of leaves rustling in the remnants of the great hibernian forest, the earth and granite carved by the great glacial actions of geological time. This was my spatial complement to King’s Cross.

From 1981 onwards we went north every year. And many of the Body And Light drawings (1990-93) were done both in what was by then our new home in South London and at night in the Lake District, at the south end of Lake Coniston, in the stable of Lake End, High Nibthwaite. In the Cumbrian lakes I reconnected with the landscape that has influenced English Romanticism from the time of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge onwards. A landscape that contains the same drama as Argyll, but at a far more concentrated scale where in one day, having left our cottage in the morning, it was possible to walk through bracken and woodland up onto fells and out onto Wetherlam and the Old Man of Coniston and from there be able to see out west to the sea and Morecambe Bay; a great spreading landscape of water, forest, rock and meadow. The dialectic between far horizons and the intimate zone of the body that was established in the early 1980s is most potently expressed in the series Body And Light from the early 1990s, ten years later.

LM B: We’re examining drawing as a visual development on paper of your thought process, in all its immediacy. There are also some prints on display in Rome, like those of the magnificent traces of the drawings in the Body And Soul series (1990). What is your relationship with time, especially with regard through the techniques like etching and lithography?

AG: All artistic inscriptions are, in a sense, made in time. And if they work they engage and lock into the present time of the viewer. Immediacy is very important to me: I want there to be a sense of absolute ‘thereness’ at the time of connection. This cannot be an unconscious ‘knitting exercise’; there has to be a sense of concentrated explosive registration. I think this is true of sculpture as well, insofar as it always stems from a lived moment that has been taken out of duration. And the closest that the drawings come to that instant of time enregistered in a material way is in Body And Soul, where five of my orifices and four of the surfaces of the skin that register weight are recorded. The idea of Body And Soul is, in a way, to simply record the way that gravity acts on the mass of the body through the skin and to think about the portals of the body as literally being windows of the soul, but windows seen from the inside and not from the outside. They are the result of an instant registration, of a moment of contact, like a kiss, which is made timeless.

LM B: In some drawings of the 1990s, pigment and watercolour combined with casein create an imaginary space that is almost suspended in the liquid nature of the material and in darkness as the dominant luminosity. When looking at them, I again find the impossibility of comprehending this extraordinary paradox, which can also be seen in the finest works of the later Titian. What does this sense of plunging in, floating, and immersing oneself in these drawings mean to you? Are they ‘events in black’? How would you interpret that tone and that colour?

AG: The Body And Light drawings, done mainly at night, in the silence of the cottage at Lake End, are a meditation on immersion: immersion within the landscape, but also within the darkness of the night and within the darkness of the lake (Coniston Lake is extraordinarily deep and, as you dive down three metres and below, it is literally black). Many of the drawings evoke this and were an attempt to re-imagine total immersion in this dark, cold, liquid environment and the movement up into the light above. The making of the drawings was also an immersion into the watery element; these small squares of paper were completely wet before beginning to draw. Cumbria has the highest rainfall in the British Isles, and the drawings convey something of the sense of long nights, of huddling around a wood burning stove (necessary even in high summer!) and sensing, in the quiet and comfort of a human shelter, exposure to the elements, to darkness and to space. The oracular here is very relevant: the gestures of drawing are in a sense extended and confounded by the behaviour of pigment on the wet paper and the emergent images would be the result of whatever I was able to conjure from what was happening in the negotiation between this reaction and the surface of the paper. Thus, in a sense, every drawing is a collaboration between what happens in a chemical reaction, and how that reaction can run in parellel with the arising of images, the evocation of feelings, the reference to light and space. It was a matter of descending into a zone in which everything was fluid, everything was possible; in which the normal distinctions between internal and external dissolved. The relationship between internal imagination, the behaviour of these pigments and the world at large became open and fluid. I think of these as, in a sense, messages from the dream-world. They are spaces in which shadows are substantial and the absolute and transitional co-equal. The works are inconsistent. But I have no interest in stylistic consistency. Drawing is itself a necessary escape from convention, and from the conventions of drawing itself. You might say these are not drawings at all, if we understand drawing as the attempt to make a believable representation of objects in space and how light falls on them. All of my drawings are from the point of view of the experiencing subject, and therefore all of them come from an internal registration of light, time and event.

I would often draw late into the night, finishing at two or three in the morning, the floor by then covered with past years’, months’ and weeks’ newspapers and the drying drawings. On waking I could see the ‘field’ of dry drawings when looking over the balcony from where our bed was suspended, and then I would harvest the crop, rejecting or putting for re-working those that were worth it and burning the ones that were not, sometimes delighted and sometimes profoundly disappointed by the surprises that I would find between the wet work and the state it had become in its long journey to being dry. Yet in spite of these sadnesses I think that the works remain a source of inspiration and exploration. As brush and pigment on paper, many would not deem these to be drawings at all. But they are perhaps drawing something up from the unconscious or from dimly perceived feelings; drawing something from below, from below the surface of things.

About your enquiry as to the nature of black, that paper can absorb light is as important as the fact that it reflects it. I’m hoping that these drawings release the viewer from the desire to recognise or to name and allow him or her to float in an indeterminate world in which everything becomes possible. They are unfinished in their nature and are about becoming.

When we close our eyes, we are in a space, the darkness of the body. Blackness or night is absence of light, but it’s also a place of possibility. It always has been. In darkness resides fear, but also a certain comfort. In darkness the connection between the inner realm and the context, or the outer, is blurred. For me, these Body And Light drawings try to connect feelings of embodiment with feelings of being in the elements, and try to do so in a way in which there is little interpretation but rather the invitation to enter a shared dream-space. I notated my dreams for over twenty five years. I don’t do it any more because I don’t sleep so much. For me drawing is a form of dreaming with one’s eyes open. And darkness is the medium of the dream.

What has all of this got to do with sculpture? I think sculpture is about making the incommensurable palpable; about perhaps realising states of being that are on the edge of consciousness or lie outside conventional causal relations, material and present. But of course sculpture has certain physical limitations that drawing on paper cannot have. And I like the idea that these drawings are a kind of psychic cinema.

LM B: The process involves the sheet of paper as a field of dynamic experimentation, almost a constant flow that, at first sight, participates freely in the apparition of the ‘figure’ and of the composition: how did you proceed with the Trajectory Fields (2001-09)?

AG: I think the ground under which the floating oracular event unfolds later became more like a board game. The Trajectory Fields were made first with stones but then with steel ball bearings dropped into ink and then dropped onto the paper. I think of the paper as a player. And I loved the aleatory operation of this form of working: the level of control in this is minimal. It’s a case of throwing a dice that’s not square but round and what we get is not a result but rather a trajectory. This is ‘taking a line for a walk’ in a new way. The inertia of the ball, the flatness of the surface on which it travels, the diameter and weight of the ball, the speed at which it travels are all variables, but are connected in the event. And this is evidence of the event. I love the fact that it has speed and that out of these confused lines comes the possibility of a human space in space.

LM B: In the exhibition, visitors will be able to see your entire graphic development, freely examining the itinerary that opens up to the ‘thought diagram’ and to your ‘graphic thinking.’ How would you define the inception and gesture of the works from the 2000s, which you called Clearing (2004-09)? And also, how would you define the works on paper - both mysteriously tenuous and built up in a struggle of signs in an almost cosmic dimension - called Feeling Material (2001-10)? What desires led you to explore in that direction? And how do they relate to your research in the field of sculpture?

AG: The Feeling Material and Clearing drawings happened at the same time: it was this seismic instrument of a ball that leaves the trace of its passage across a membrane that led me directly to think of using a needle to provide a graphic line that was not so much on the paper as in it, and to thereby translate more directly the motions of the body behind the scribing point. It happened via using an underarm deodorant filled with pigment, with which I did the first of the Clearing drawings. The realisation that I could use an etching burin to draw directly and that extremely dilute washes of carbon in casein would soak into the line was a bit of a breakthrough.

I think of these drawings as being the most precise mental maps, but also body diagrams: energy fields that indicate, as in the Trajectory Fields, a real event, a moment of a body in motion, but now with the whole body implied behind this line. Feeling Material was then an attempt to try to indicate the body inside the energy field of the Clearing drawings and it strongly relates to some sculptures of the same period, where insider-like concentrations of highly-wrought wire are at the centre of increasingly large orbital circuits around a body zone.

LM B: When I look at a drawing like Dakota II of 1997, I feel your relationship with the continuity of lines and structures being developed in other works, not as an obstructive grid but as a point and flow of connection - and this is precisely the connection and breathing space that the Breathing Rooms (2001-10) demand. In recent works like Another Singularity III (2009), there is an almost genetic form of construction, and an organicity that is plunged into a macroscopic view of a world which, on the contrary, is infinitesimal. We see teeming life in a germinal state, as in the sculpture Ferment (2007). This vitality precipitates into a place that is mental as well as of the figure, located between ‘birth, stability, and collapse.’ This is a unique form of balance that I believe may underlie the consistent many-sidedness of your recent developments. In the workshop of your thoughts, what are your forthcoming plans for this freedom to experiment?

AG: You talk about the freedom of the line not to obstruct or control but to connect. For me the idea of a line is not about being the defining limit of something - not about describing the edge or, in traditional drawing, the relationship of light to surface - but rather an open energy register. You could say that my more recent drawings have escaped the distinctions between figure and ground, in which one is never certain whether the energy field is a result of the body or the body is a result of the energy field. Breathing Room is also a form of drawing that is an attempt to liberate the line from both its functional purpose of description into a kind of floating matrix that is the opposite of containing and within which the viewer’s presence becomes the subject in the ground. This, I would say, is a radical revision of iconography. In other words, the loss of the represented subject in favour of an open ground or an indicator of potential place in a field. This is the point at which my sculpture and my drawing have become completely united. And you could say that this is the subject of this exhibition: the degree to which all four sculptures in the exhibition drawings in space that interfere with but also relate to the architectural structuring of space that contains them, while remaining autonomous objects.

In response to what you call ‘the workshop of thoughts’ and the ‘freedom of experimentation,’ as far as I’m concerned, style is a defensive mechanism. It is the declaration of an authority built on competence, and competence is of no interest to me: every time I sit in front of the whiteness of a piece of paper, I want an adventure into the unknown. I want the work to be a conduit for expressions of vitality and a confrontation with the conditions of life, but always with a view to opening them up, accepting the limitations of mortality and the distinctions between the palpable, the perceivable and the imaginable whilst simultaneously allowing fluid transit between those states. Drawing is one of the keys through which that freedom in my work has been expressed.