Scrimshaw

Lumen & Logic

A monochrome engraving in which the ornament and the night sky are the same drawing. The frame holds nothing but annuli of wheels: a mandala is a small wheel seen whole, a sweeping band across the sheet is one annulus of a wheel far larger than the frame, and the vortex is a wheel with a logarithmic twist so its rings never close. Most wheel centres fall outside the frame, so every large form is cropped and the picture reads as a detail lifted out of something bigger. What any annulus is filled with is never chosen: a single coverage field says how much of the area at that place should be ink, and a register ladder turns that number into a fill — bare ground and a scatter of stars at the bottom of the ladder, then drifts of very fine low-opacity hair, then graded stipple, then bead chains, tick trains and dogtooth, then scallops, meanders, ladders and eyelets in one keyline weight, then packed scale and scrollwork, then dense radial hatch, and at the top a solid swash of ink or of ground. So a single sweeping band passes through five textures along its own length, the ornament frays into isolated repeats and then into single ticks at its margin rather than stopping at an edge, and the sky is not drawn at all — it is the annuli the field told to stay empty. Every value in the picture is a count of lines per unit area: the glow at the centre of a disc is several hundred radial hairlines crowding as they converge, the soft grey of a haze is a bundle of dozens of very faint strands, and the black of deep sky is bare ground. There is no gradient, no blur, no bloom, no shadow and no blend mode anywhere. Every curve is a polyline carrying a slow hand wobble, drawn at one of four line weights, in one of several ink tiers so the near ornament reads brighter than the far. Stars are stratified over the unclaimed ground with a power-law size draw and a soft galactic corridor of raised density, and the largest few carry a four-ray cross flare drawn, like everything else, in lines.

Medium: Generative algorithm, archival pigment print
Dimensions: 60 × 90 cm