About

Ink on paper since 2013. Nothing traced, no underdrawing — each line is placed against the one before it, and the shape is whatever the accumulation turns out to be.

Seventy finished drawings across thirteen years, in two chapters. In that time the line has thinned to a hair, broken into full colour, and finally stopped branching altogether — but it has never once been planned.

None of it happens in a studio. These get made on kitchen tables, in waiting rooms, on trains, in the twenty minutes before something else. The whole practice fits in a coat pocket, which is most of why it has lasted.

He also writes; that work is listed below.

Where the name came from

The drawings began as thick black nets and thinned, over about four years, into hairline dendrites: the branching arbour of a nerve cell, drawn without a plan for where the line ends up. That is what a nerve blossom is, and the name held for eight years and 44 drawings.

Why there are two names

Around 2022 the work stopped branching and started flowing. The lines began behaving less like nerve and more like fascia — fibres gathering, cinching through a waist, opening out again. Connective tissue rather than signal.

Rete mirabile — the wonderful net — is the anatomical term for a dense mesh of vessels that slows a flow down and spreads it out so something can be exchanged across it. The plural is retia mirabilia, and it is what the last 26 drawings are.

So: Nerve Blossoms is the practice, and the name of everything up to 2021. Retia Mirabilia is the series it turned into. Both are on the map — the older work in bone, the current work in gold.

Elsewhere

• Seb GillenEverything else, in one place
• More Than ImpossibleMemoir and essays
• Century City Starlight
• Cosimo Peregrine
• LudonauticaGames

Prints and enquiries

Most works are available as prints. For availability, commissions, or exhibition enquiries, get in touch.