Drawing Stones - Sedimented Lines
This ongoing series explores the materiality and memory of stone through drawing.
The daily drawings form a layered archive: a durational engagement with the surface and substance of stone, imagined or encountered. Through repetition, erosion becomes line, mass becomes gesture.
Even in the smallest sign, drawing emerges from an embodied relationship: a search for connection with the rock.
For me, drawing is not the pursuit of artistry, but a continual attempt to get closer to what lies beneath the surface — to the essence of stone and the logic of geological thinking.
Graphite, charcoal, or clay and mud echo geological textures — striations, fractures, flows. The act of drawing is an act of transformation, a tool of excavation: slowly revealing a landscape that lies both beneath and within.
Stone, in this practice, is not subject but collaborator — resisting, imprinting, revealing.
To draw a stone is to enter into dialogue with deep time.
In practice, this takes various forms:
A way of thinking through stone
In February 2025, I began a daily drawing project: each day, one stone. For a year, I committed to tracing at least one stone, sometimes a single pebble, sometimes several, sometimes an entire rock formation or mountainous landscape.
What appears as repetition became a form of research.
In daily graphite drawings in my sketchbook, I trace imagined or encountered stones. Some emerge from photographs, some from direct observation, others from the imagination.
What began as a time-bound continues as an ongoing inquiry, a way of thinking through stone, through repetition, through touch and line. Drawing turned into a way of studying stone not as object but as relation — not the hidden rock mass below ground, but the weathered surfaces through which structure becomes form.
Looser, larger charcoal drawings allow for movement and physical engagement — a freer line, expressive, textured, and gestural. Here, drawing becomes almost choreographic: my hand and arm follow impulses, the charcoal breaks under pressure as I try to transfer my sense of the terrain directly onto the paper or dream myself into a stone-scape, letting its energy move through me.
At times, I am drawing with stone: using natural materials like clay, loess, or mud from the Flysch zone. With my fingers, the gesture becomes more elemental. These drawings resist precision — each material behaves differently, depending on the stone evoked. Once dried, I often revisit them with charcoal, layering one form of stone over another.