My practice is rooted in drawing and has been since 2008, when I chose to focus on the drawn mark as my primary medium. My process is methodical, utilising mirrored and inverted geometry alongside the repeated tactility of the manually drawn mark. As a result, drawing has become both my process and my outcome: each work exists simultaneously as an image and as an act of construction.

When drawing, I dwell close to the surface and move slowly across it, paying attention to the singularity of each gesture while allowing individual elements to form a larger compositional whole. Formulating one mark after another over time leads to a particular awareness in which each drawing can only be made at its own pace; it has its own rhythm, activated by an intimate relationship between hand and eye, mark and surface.

Many of my drawings hover at the edge of sight and are designed to slow visual acuity. From afar, a drawing may appear as a blank surface; from a middle distance, the drawing’s sensation and effect become visible; and, from close up, the reading is an accumulation of points and lines creating fields of tone. Working with visual thresholds, enhanced by a limited palette of tonal graphite greys, silver, and blues and greens, I aim to induce a measured kind of looking in which the physical mark is evident yet may equally point beyond itself. The intention is to create an illusory space that operates like a clearing or an evaporation that withdraws, as much as it draws in, that is both full and seemingly empty.

At various times, I have thought I had made major shifts in my practice, yet I return, time and again, to my prevailing inquiry into the phenomenal nature of the picture plane, guided by meditative concentration and shaped by qualities of stillness and lightness. I sustain my attention through the accumulation of points and lines, with compositions that suggest an undulation of the paper’s surface and a shallow pictorial space, often directed towards circularity. I draw out of curiosity and use drawing as a form of meditation, engaging with the world through tactile, sensory, and contemplative processes.

Duncan Bullen

June 2026