stories from the city
Looking for signs
The following suite of drawings presents a series of observations captured on cameraphone. The images were then translated into detailed pen & ink drawings, in an intense process of dotting, cross-hatching and repetition.
Each "snapshot" celebrates a seemingly unremarkable urban manifestation that held poetic resonance on some level, as it was encountered. Some of the images are entirely observational, whilst others introduce an imaginary element.
Operating on a symbolic level, each drawing seeks to create a sensory connection with periphery phenomena of the everyday. Reflecting a very human desire to find deeper meaning within the natural and material world around us.
"...to read the city is to read an urbanized self, to know the city from within. Once we lose a transcendental signifier, the totalizing process is called into question and the city turns into a place of mystery: chance and the unexpected dominate, a romantic sense of the uncanny becomes exaggerated, and the city takes on the meaning of pure text, to be created by each individual and read."
R. Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Culture History, 1998