Rootlines — Large Mixed Media Works
The large-scale mixed media works form a central and physically immersive strand within the ongoing Rootlines project. Expanding beyond the intimacy of drawing and sketchbook-based exploration, these works allow the visual language of Rootlines to unfold across space, material, and layered processes.
Built through the accumulation of multiple techniques — including drawing, print-based layers, washes, stains, and gestural mark-making — each work develops slowly, responding to earlier decisions rather than following a predetermined composition. The surface becomes a site of negotiation, where control and chance coexist, and where the image is shaped through duration, repetition, and material resistance.
Organic structures emerge gradually: dense root masses, branching systems, eroded forms, and network-like patterns that oscillate between landscape, anatomy, and abstraction. Heavy, grounded areas anchor the composition, while lighter lines and translucent layers extend outward, suggesting fragile connections, peripheral growth, and movement beneath the surface. These contrasts echo natural systems in which stability and vulnerability exist simultaneously.
Scale plays a crucial role in this series. Working large requires bodily engagement — the movement of the arm, the shifting of weight, the endurance of sustained mark-making. The viewer, in turn, encounters the work not as an image to be read quickly, but as a terrain to be entered. The eye travels across layers, following paths that resist a single focal point or linear narrative.
Material traces are deliberately preserved. Drips, tonal inconsistencies, overlapping marks, and areas of abrasion remain visible, reinforcing the project’s interest in process, memory, and the unseen labour of growth. Rather than aiming for resolution or polish, the works retain a sense of openness — as if still in a state of becoming.
Within Rootlines, the large mixed media works operate as expanded maps of connection and persistence. They do not describe specific places, but evoke internal and collective landscapes shaped by time, pressure, and adaptation. Each piece stands as an autonomous work while remaining connected to the wider visual ecosystem of the project — a network of forms that continues to grow, branch, and transform.
WORKS IN PROGRESS:
