Inchoate (2026)

Installation, 200 x 50 x 40 cm

water, alginate (seaweed), calcium, carbon, bone and lamp black pigment, aluminium extrusion stand, LED lights, hydroponic water chiller, canister filter, pvc tubes, clamps

Inchoate transforms traditional drawing pigments — carbon, charcoal, burnt bone — into membranous forms using techniques borrowed from molecular gastronomy and ocean ecology. A drawn line loses its fixity: alginate meets calcium and forms a membrane, a boundary between self and other, the same building block that structured the first life in the ocean. What emerges are not marks but organisms — pulsing, reforming, shifting continuously in suspension.

The installation holds a drawing in an inchoate state: as it might exist in the mind before externalisation, still churning, rotating, undecided. Each form is drawn and undrawn by the water that carries it, refusing the fixity of a finished line on a page.

Working with the earliest materials of mark-making returns the drawing to evolutionary time — to our shared origin as membrane-bound creatures in primordial oceans, before self and other, inside and outside, were distinct. The piece asks what forces act on an idea before it takes shape, how consciousness forms, and how the ocean is still present in the body.