Graphite
& Fell

I make drawings that stop at the moment most representation moves past — the instant when looking long enough at something begins to reveal what it actually is.

My practice draws from the tradition of the field naturalist: the conviction that sustained, rigorous observation of a living system is itself a form of argument. I work in graphite and ink on cotton paper, applying that observational discipline to subjects that exist at the edge of common attention — the tidal margin of Delaware Bay, the human figure under conditions that physiology and psychology share equally, the biological event that has unfolded for 450 million years on a coastline most people cross without stopping.

Every subject I draw is in the act of becoming something else. The horseshoe crab at the waterline is not simply an animal — it is one of the longest continuous biological success stories on Earth, photographed at the moment it is either surviving another cycle or beginning its last one. A figure in motion is not a pose but a mechanical and physiological event, the skeleton and musculature doing something specific that the body's surface conceals. I am interested in what the concealment costs.

I draw from observation and from imagination in equal proportion, and I don't consider this a contradiction. The field naturalist who reconstructs a species from fragmentary evidence is doing what I do when I work from imagination: using accumulated biological knowledge to generate form that could exist, that in some sense must exist, given what we know about how living systems behave. The imagination is disciplined by what close looking teaches. The drawings are documents of that discipline.

The darkness in this work is structural, not decorative. It comes from refusing to resolve what is genuinely unresolved — from holding open the space between beauty and precarity, between specimen and subject, between what a body is and what it is in the process of ceasing to be. I am less interested in what a thing is than in what it reveals when you look at it long enough and honestly enough to see it.

My work in graphite and ink is the native language of this practice: these are the materials of field journals, anatomical atlases, navigational charts, and the historical record. The drawing is a document. The question is what it records.