Vectorizing the Invisible
In Kapisillit, Greenland—a village cradled by fjords and endless, breathing silence—the process shifted. Here, it wasn’t enough to work from memory or second-hand impressions. The land itself called for a different kind of attention: a direct engagement, an embodied recording of what could not be photographed or drawn in a traditional sense. Out in the field, the process of vector abstraction transformed into something alive. Rather than working from finished forms, I began by feeling the terrain—letting my body map its contours through sensation first. The way the wind carved the fjord’s edges, the subtle asymmetry of ice breaking off in slow, secret rhythms, the texture of light across tundra grasses—these became internal movements, energetic impressions.
Instead of sketching scenes, I gathered impressions of contrast: where presence pressed against absence, where form hesitated at the threshold of formlessness. Kapisillit offered a living architecture of emergence—land and water continually negotiating their borders, just as line and void would later negotiate space in the vector work. Back in the studio, these field sensations found their way into stark, simplified forms. The act of vectorizing was not a replication, but a translation: a way of encoding the field’s unspoken language into glyphs of pure presence. Each print became a kind of seed-map—a compact memory of place, pared down to its energetic bones.
Kapisillit taught that abstraction is not an escape from reality, but a deeper rooting into it. In the cold clarity of that northern landscape, you learned to listen for the signal beneath the noise, to see the signature behind the seen. The field became the first etching; the body, the first printing press. What emerged was not a landscape portrait, but a vibrational memory—a way of carrying the land forward, alive and unfolding, even once the ice and fjords were far behind.
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