I made these drawings during a residency at the Viarco Factory, Sâo Joâo de Madeira, Portugal using different forms of graphite manufactured there, on calligraphy exercise books that I had bought in Porto.

 

The drawings are both a response to the factory itself; grey with accumulated graphite dust, spring light seeping through successive grids of Crittall windows, waiting in expectant silence before a delivery, combined with project about birds that I carried from home in the back of my mind.

 

The drawing depicts one windowpane, experienced through different drawing approaches. The textured glass of the window obscured any view of outside from where I worked. Instead, I was affected by the birds I could not see: the sounds of unseen house sparrows in the yard below and swifts, the roaming marks in the sky of the previous evening.

 

The work continues to explore a metaphor between book pages and birds, the flapping page of a double page spread, fixed on the spine, recalls the symmetry and motion of a bird's outstretched wings. The fluttering marks used to draw the windowpane combine explicit and implied, conscious and unconscious references to the birds and their movement.