2001-2002
colored pencil
school paper
each: 8″x10″
wandering is a series of 40 drawings in an attempt to create a complete translation of herman hesse’s book ‘wandering’. each piece is comprised of a series of similar lines involving 26 different colored green pencils. each shade of green corresponds to a single letter of the alphabet, and thus the text is ‘read’ as a kind of score or set of instructions for placing the lines on the page in a specific order.
of course, the overall composition of the lines is intuitive, but the number of lines and the shades of green are based upon this chance operation and “reading” of the text. the process also allowed the slowest possible reading experience of a text i have read at least 20 times…
since the book is half poems and half prose, i made a drawing for every paragraph of prose, and a drawing of every poem.
these drawings were one of the first pure explorations of chance operation within my working process, and was an important precedent in both process and execution.