Thoughts

Building on my recent research into structural and spatial thinking, freestanding structures, and anamorphic imagery, I have started to recognise how these ideas connect back to my ongoing investigations into facial blindness and fragmented portraiture. Rather than treating the drawing as a flat image, I am beginning to understand it as something spatial and unstable — something that can be physically disrupted, repositioned, and re-seen depending on where the viewer stands.

The process of spiltting my drawings apart and reconfiguring them mirrors the instability of recognition that exists within prosopagnosia (facial blindness). Facial features no longer function as fixed identifiers, but as fragments that shift in relation to one another. By cutting, rearranging, layering, and drawing back over the top of previous marks, the work begins to operate more like a perceptual mapping process than a traditional portrait. The image is constantly moving between coherence and collapse.

The freestanding and structural elements I have been researching also reinforce this idea. When drawings move off the wall and into space, they begin to behave less like singular images and more like bodies or architectural forms that the viewer must physically navigate. This creates moments where fragmented sections temporarily align before separating again, echoing anamorphic strategies where meaning only resolves from a particular position. In this way, perception becomes active and unstable rather than immediate or fixed.

I think this is important to my practice because it reframes fragmentation as a conceptual and perceptual strategy rather than simply a visual style. The splitting, layering, and reworking of my drawings become methods for examining how recognition is constructed, interrupted, and reconstructed through perception. In relation to prosopagnosia (facial blindness), this process reflects the difficulty of reading a face as a complete and stable image. Instead, recognition often becomes dependent on isolated details, spatial relationships, gesture, memory, and context. My drawings operate through similar logic: images are broken into parts, repositioned, obscured, and drawn back over so that meaning remains unstable and continually shifting.

This also connects closely to my interest in note-taking and accumulation within drawing. The surface develops through layers of repeated marks, annotations, corrections, and interruptions that record a process of searching rather than resolution. The work becomes less concerned with producing a singular image and more focused on tracing the instability of perception itself. Fragmentation therefore functions both visually and conceptually, allowing the drawing to operate as a recording of looking, misrecognition, reconstruction, and memory.

The structural and freestanding elements within my recent work extend these ideas into physical space. By separating drawings across multiple surfaces or constructing works that exist independantly from the wall, the art of recognition becomes bodily and spatial. Viewers are required to move around the work.

This relationship between movement, perspective, and image construction connects closely to anamorphic strategies, where an image only resolves from a specific viewpoint. As the viewer shifts position, coherence can quickly collapse back into fragmentation. This instability mirrors the fluctuating nature of recognition associated with facial blindness, where identification is often partial, delayed, or reliant on contextual cues.

Working back over existing drawings also becomes significant within this framework. Earlier marks remain visible beneath new layers, creating surfaces that hold multiple stages of perception simultaneously. Rather than concealing mistakes or revisions, the work preserves them as evidence of an ongoing negotiation between recognition and uncertainty.