Ground Truth

Ground truth is a surveyor’s term. It is what you find when you go and stand on the ground, as opposed to what the map or the photograph says is there. I liked it for this piece because every sheet is the opposite way round. Nothing here was ever real ground, and all of it gets surveyed anyway, measured and annotated and signed off, with complete confidence, as if someone had walked it.

It starts with shapes. Every sheet is built from three sizes of the same few forms, circles and squares and pentagons and arches and crosses, each size speaking in one shape only. The large form decides everything. Sometimes it is a pattern of two or three placed with intent, sometimes a range of peaks sharing one baseline, sometimes a column of melted circles standing on the centre of the page. And on nearly half of sheets it is too big for the page altogether, so all you get is its edge, an arc or a corner or one long straight side coming in from off the sheet and leaving most of the paper open. That last family arrived late and changed the piece more than anything else did. The medium forms then take a position against the large one. They weigh against it from the far side, or string out along a diagonal, or guard an empty space, or one of them breaks the frame on purpose. The smallest marks gather into swarms where the ground allows them.

Then everything is painted, and painted in watercolour rather than printed. Each form is a stack of nested washes that bleed at their edges, with a paper halo around it and, on the largest, one deep dark wash at its heart. That dark core took a long time to find. For weeks the sheets sat in the middle of the value range and read as fog, and it was only when I took the colour off and looked at the tones alone that I could see why. Every sheet needs one real dark and some clean paper, and now it has both.

Over the paint goes the survey. A network strung between the smallest marks, a centre line run through the largest form, the hidden edges of one shape dashed where they pass behind another, a zone of the sheet hatched as a material. Each of these came out of the drawing itself, measured off shapes already on the page, which is why they belong to it. There were six of them at one point, all on at once, and six systems of fine grey line do not read as six systems. They read as haze. So every sheet now gets one lead system at full weight and one support drawn back, and the rest stand down. Around the edge sit the rulers, the registration marks, the callouts and, on most sheets, a title block, all lettered in runes, because the sheet should look specified without ever saying anything.

Half of the sheets slip. A band across the middle of the large form has been pulled sideways in steps, like a scan that lost its place, and every line that crosses it inherits the stagger. And the paper is pressed. The forms sit a little below the sheet, the way ink sits in a print, and on most sheets the whole image area is struck into the paper like a platemark, lit from one corner.

As with everything I make, a lot of the work was taking things out. I built a magnified detail view and cut it, twice, because anything that closes a boundary sits on top of this drawing instead of in it. I tried a column of mixed shapes, a whole set of border treatments, and a quieter ground with less swarm and less bend, and kept only what made the sheets clearer. The piece ran to fifty two versions. Every sheet comes from a single number. It is all SVG, vector all the way through, drawn in my own framework rather than anyone’s drawing library, the way I have always built things, so it holds at any size.