Elizabeth Graff

  
Writing and drawing – these acts of putting marks on a page – are tools I use to process the world. They allow me to unpack my experiences and to record them. Throughout my comps process, I considered the importance of making marks and I wondered about how the formation and evolution of thoughts relates to the act of mark-making. Inspired by a trip to the planetarium last summer where I read about how stars are born, metaphors filled my mind. Ideas, to me, seemed no different than stars; it made sense to think of ideas as swirling clouds of the dust of older ideas, all embedded in mysterious dark matter. Moreover, just as we look up at the night sky and draw imaginary lines between the stars to form constellations, we create networks of meaning by drawing connections between our ideas. It is as though the structure of the galaxy is reproduced on a much smaller scale in our minds, and the whole night sky is like a mind full of ideas. As I was drawing and painting this mind-space, I noticed my reliance on words. Text kept cropping up in my sketchbook; I needed words to expand my ideas and push my thinking. Intrigued by the separate but overlapping ways in which words and images give rise to meaning, I began to see lines of text as mappings of conceptual landscapes. Like ants, tiny words crawled across my drawings. These paths of text made me think of words as footprints, or as the thought tracks we leave behind as records of our cerebral journeys.