Solid Objects Are Mostly Empty Space

This drawing uses the language of drafting: lines that describe the edge of a thing to be made, the boundary where one object becomes itself rather than another. Drafting is a human way of seeing: it turns the world into discrete units, clean separations, ownable parts.

But the world beneath the line doesn’t honor those borders. Electrons and magnetic fields don’t stop at an outline. Gravity doesn’t recognize a product. Even “solidity” is mostly space, structures held together by relationships and forces rather than by any true edge. The boundary is practical for us, not fundamental.

In the center is a pile of motorcycles, metaphors of travel and freedom, and also of the loop of desire: more, better, newer. We build objects as containers for wanting, as if satisfaction could be manufactured into a bounded thing. Yet desire behaves less like an object and more like a field, moving through bodies and stories, attaching, dispersing, returning.

Around the pile, foliage takes the longer view. The planet’s processes preceded us and will outlast us. Machines oxidize, rubber cracks, metal returns to mineral; our plans and hungers dissolve into the same chemistry. What we call waste is not an end, but a phase change, decay, death, and new life. The drawing holds these timescales together: the sharp line of the human edge, and the slow continuity that absorbs it.

I built the drawing machine over six months, then worked on this drawing for another three. The image is composed of more than fifty layers. Each layer begins as a 3D model that I render, clean up, rasterize, and redraw. I send it back through the machine, which draws the image with a pencil or pen, then live with it for a few days. At regular intervals, I intervene by hand, reworking sections or details, altering forms, and modifying the system itself, then photographing the result and returning to the computer to draw the next layer.

This video shows a detail of the printer using a mechanical pencil. It will sense when the lead is too short and click the pencil to extend the lead.