Explaining / Myself

I've always drawn, and have been drawn to, diagrams, schematics and icons. They're densely loaded with meaning in a way that words alone rarely seem. And I’ve always been intrigued by the unique way that the diagrammatic can embody and illustrate ideas. I’m fascinated with how the symbolic acquires meaning, and I pay attention to how visual systems infiltrate our world—how they usually begin with specific functions but invariably undergo alterations, mutations and distortions. Diagrams are a sort of x-ray vision—the revealing of some hard-to-grasp truth. And this feels to me like an important part of seeing, a glimpse into the unseen systems of things.

I can only say that I try to make artworks that somehow operate in this zone—work which combines the abstract, the representational and the symbolic in ways that question how we commonly decode them. But the work doesn’t exist to just be deciphered. These works are proposals, made with fragments of both the seemingly meaningful and the less obviously so. The aim is to create a counterpoint of carefully-positioned, resonant notes. If successful, the work echoes the joy of reading a good map, the surprise of discovering a hidden pattern, or the appreciation of a wrong-sounding chord that somehow just feels right.

—TD, March 2024