Omniscient Body
Hand-drawn immersive installation, 74' wide x 14' tall, 2018.
Charcoal pencils and compressed charcoal sticks on white paper.
Installed at the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University, as part of my MFA Thesis Exhibition 'Out of Body/Into Being.'
Left wall: drawing of Earth and the moon, central wall: drawing of Mars, right wall: drawing of a ring of Saturn and two of its moons
Left wall: Earth and the Moon, Right wall: Mars
A viewer looking up at the Earth drawing.
While it’s often assumed that this work arose from an interest in astronomy, it actually began following the 2016 US presidential election. In that time of anxiety and fear, what I wanted to experience and create for others was a moment of clarity or refuge that puts one’s current situation into perspective, and momentarily lessens its weight. I often experience this when I try to wrap my mind around something that is infinitely larger or smaller than I am - something that causes me to reconsider my scale, and my place in time and space.
This immersive, hand-drawn installation invites the audience to be enveloped in space, to approach the celestial body of Mars at their own scale, to be towered over by one of the rings of Saturn, and to look up at planet Earth and the Moon as though from a great distance.
Questions I considered while making this work were: When do we feel immense? When do we feel insignificant? And, how can I cause the viewer to feel both magnificently grand and impossibly small within the same space?
While walking through this installation, the viewer is towered over and engulfed, yet standing in the middle of the room, the viewer becomes the central body around which the planets orbit, taking on a central significance.
The drawings of the Earth and Moon have also been exhibited as a separate installation titled Overview. View and read about it here
Drawing installation
Drawing of Mars, 7'6" x 7'6", charcoal pencils & compressed charcoal sticks on white paper.
Feature 3
At seven and a half feet tall and wide, Mars just begins to loom over human height, recalling the dimensions of the sphere encircling the Vitruvian Man. As I investigated the planet, I noticed striking similarities between its surface and my own. As I drew, I began relating to it as one body to another. Its jagged Mariner Valley became the scabbed scar across my leg; its craters began to resemble birth marks. It was my hope that my audience would begin to recognize themselves in this astronomical entity, as I did while I was drawing it.
Viewers exploring the Mars drawing
details of mars
Entirely hand-drawn using charcoal pencils and compressed charcoal sticks on white paper, these trompe-l’oeil style drawings appear convincingly three-dimensional from afar. Upon close examination, however, one perceives the thousands of pencil marks that make up the images.
As the viewers' eyes adjust to the dim gallery lighting, even from the seemingly smooth, empty space enveloping the planets emerge the gestural marks that make up the texture of the drawn void. The hand becomes evident in its making, revealing a record of movements and actions of the body, and allowing the viewer to imagine their own hand taking part in its creation.
What was previously perceived to be stillness becomes animated. Absence becomes presence. The void becomes full, transformed from an empty non-space into a productive, primordial scene of emergence, as though preceding the beginnings of the universe.
