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 not depiction, but 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:
In daily graphite drawings in my sketchbook, I trace imagined or encountered stones — boulders in mountainous landscapes, rock formations from memory, or balancing stones in the forests of the Waldviertel. Some emerge from photos, some from life, others from the imagination.
More drawings will be posted in the blog.
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.
More recently, I’ve begun 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.