These paintings build maze-like patterns that read, at a distance, like a city mapped from above — except the streets follow no plan. Each line moves by impulse rather than route, laid down without knowing in advance where it will end.
Hidden within the maze is often a word, usually the piece’s own title, folded into the pattern until it’s almost illegible — there to be found, not announced.
The liberating part of this way of working, is there really are no ‘mistakes’, because there’s no correct version to fall short of, and the lines creating the maze-like patterns are based on impulses. What holds the impulse together is a framework of shape — a background or contour that gives the improvisation somewhere to happen, so the marks accumulate rather than scatter. Small symbols and repeated motifs recur at different scales within the pattern, closer to fractal logic than composition. What the final result will look like is never really knowable in advance; only the containing shape is fixed, not what fills it.
If Rough Edge Cartography maps migration, Cartography of Mind maps something closer to thought itself — not where someone goes, but how impulse behaves once it’s given a boundary to move inside.
