Temperamental

There are lines in the landscape because every landscape is forged in movement, and because this movement leaves material traces along the manifold paths of its proceeding. To perceive these lines is not to see things as they are but to see the directions along which things are moving. – Tim Ingold, Correspondences, 2022

This work began as a response to Saturn’s rings – an immense drift of ice and rock that appear as clean lines from afar – and to the glitches in the raw images from the Cassini mission. But it soon became more about the living presence of the materials, the line no longer a tool of representation.

Drawn freehand in ink on thin layout paper, the lines shift as water, pigment, and paper collide. As the paper dries, it wrinkles, warps, and pulls the ink along with it. The original gestures are altered—expanded, distorted—by the very materials that hold them. Curves recur, the circle suggested but never complete. Each piece is formed from many sheets, their gridded edges multiplying lines of tension, rhythm, and rupture.

In Temperamental II, the emphasis moves beyond the line to the dialogue between neighbouring sheets, creating atlas-like structures that map the unpredictable behaviour of ink, water, and paper across a fragmented surface.