Paintings & Drawings2020produced

HUMAN SPIRIT

A standing figure with nothing inside it but small marks

A standing human figure on a black ground, its whole body built from hundreds of small pale marks — ladders, boxes, hooks, loops and short runs of writing — with no outline anywhere

A human figure, life-scale from the knee up, standing with its arms loose at its sides. It has no outline and no shading. Everything that makes it a body is small marks — hundreds of them, ladders and boxes and hooks and loops and short runs of writing, packed tight enough that at a distance they read as a shoulder, a ribcage, a thigh.

The same work seen as a whole sheet on a white ground, showing its tall narrow proportion — The whole sheet, and its proportion: twice as tall as it is wide.

Step close and the person disappears into its own contents. Step back and they resolve again.

The marks are the same vocabulary as the black books and the five-metre panel: a private alphabet that never settles into a language. Here it is poured into a body.

100 × 50 cm.