Gadroon

Lumen & Logic

A sheet of bare paper carrying a dozen and a half fans of parallel curved ridges in blue-black ballpoint, each fan a set of concentric arcs at one pitch shared by the whole sheet — so a tight hook, a rainbow fan and a near-straight comb are three radii of one primitive rather than three kinds of mark. The fans are not placed on the sheet, they accrete: each new one is hung off a fan already there and is drawn only where no earlier fan has taken the paper, so it stops dead against its neighbour's outline and leaves a channel of clear ground between them. Every ragged front in the picture is a trim rather than a boundary, every empty eye is an inner radius nobody filled, and every bare lake is where the growth ran out of room — none of the three is drawn. A hashed minority of fans are weavers: they ignore the rule and run straight through whatever is already there, so two grids of ridges cross into a dense woven mesh with neither of them broken, thinned or on top. The mark is a scribble — a looping quiver that crosses back over its own path — with an amplitude budget that makes ridges of one fan unable to touch by arithmetic rather than by a collision test. Ink runs in patches between iron and cobalt, a few ridges strike bolder than the rest, and the radius draw is log-uniform, so one seed gives a raft of tight hooks and the next a few enormous lazy sweeps that read as straight combs.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm