Arc Hatch

Lumen & Logic

A hand-inked plate of long smooth curves that cross each other and are engraved face by face. A heavy wobbled rectangle borders the sheet, and inside it a dozen or more curves — open sweeps that enter one edge and leave another, large circles and ellipses mostly bigger than the plate, and soft multi-lobed loops — run their full length over the top of one another with no trimming and no occlusion, so the drawing is a flat arrangement rather than a stack. Every area the curves cut out of each other is filled with its own pencil of dead straight parallel hatch lines, clipped hard at the curved boundary, so curved edges and ruled infill play against each other everywhere. Tone is line spacing and nothing else: a face is bare paper, open hatch, tight hatch, or two pencils crossed at ninety degrees that mesh toward black — there is no grey ink, no wash and no shading within a face. Only a handful of hatch directions exist across the whole sheet and unrelated faces reuse them, so the plate reads as one hand working through a fixed set of wrist angles. Every line is walked as short tremulous segments that bow slightly, stop a hair short of the boundary or overshoot it, and vary in weight along their run. The arrangement lays out as a weave, a set of nested rings, a one-way cascade or a vortex about a single focus, on bare paper with a wide margin.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm