Emptying out the contents of my stove, I found half burnt lumps of coal disfigured and distorted. Instead of a homogenous dark mass, here was a complex form with nobbles and bubbles, dense parts and porous parts pitted though with holes, areas reflectove and shiny like precious metal, others like the a hardened crust of lava flow. A state of being arrested in progress. Something we usually don't see - we burn the coal away, we see coal or ash and flames, not this interim oddity. A minuature geology. The intimacy of the hearth appearing as alien as a meteorite. Material form suspended in a changing state, the apparent geology of it suggesting land masses or planetary bodies in formation , a sense of deep time and suspended time. All this aside it was a curious and mysterious object. I began to draw it. I'm not sure where these will go but curiousity suffces for now... of course there is a glimmer of an idea somewhere oscilating, flickering in and out of my consciousness but not yet close enough to grasp it to articulate it to you....
Making the drawings in pale ink - diluted fountain pen ink or even an emptied fountain pen filled with water, the traces of ink.
appears watery and other worldly.. as opposed to in pencil where it feels like a rocky landscape: