I chose texts as a starting point for this temporary, large-scale wall drawing. Each bit presents a narrative fragment: a story by my friend’s nephew; overheard snippets of conversation on the metro during rush-hour; a rule-based piece cobbled together from law archives.

The drawing itself was unplanned, it spread across 3 walls, drawn with graphite pencils and powder, roughly 26 feet long 8, 6, 12 feet tall. It was up for six months, and then, in one day, I had the fun of painting over the whole thing till nothing remained.

The alcove was tucked away on the second floor of the old Visual Arts building at Concordia University. It was a quiet, out-of-the-way spot, I don’t know if too many people saw it. This allowed me to engage with drawing as a daily practice, 8 hours a day for just over 2 months.

I feel there’s a threshold: where no-thing becomes thing.

I’ve always imagined this with as scalpel-silent entropy at one extreme, and symbolic language on the other, (whether of humans, ants, whales or what have-you, I imagine pheromonal grammar as being particularly exact).

In-between, along a meridian, there’s all the willfully vibrating nonsensical sense, a musical brigade of sweat and noise coagulating into trillions of receptors trying like hell to crystallize into clarity or die trying.

If I wasn’t numerically illiterate, I’d figure out an elegant formulaic expression for this kind of thing. But as it is, I only have my hands. It feels as if, for my kind, home is only ever along the mouth where something can be drawn out of materiality… some mineral or microbial noise becoming a signal, some of which are perceptible to humans. And though we can be rather obtuse about realizing what we sense in our own skins, drawing is one of the acts that get us there, drawing is trying to follow the signal not the noise.