Patchwork Archetype, 2023 presents a suite of intricate drawings that meditate on selected architectural and structural forms observed on the island of Utsumi, Japan. These works do not function as direct representations or formal studies, but as poetic translations – intuitive responses to the peculiar geometries and spatial arrangements embedded within the local landscape.
Each structure was initially documented for its grid-like formation and the way its repetitions – though mechanical in logic – appear softened, skewed, or made strangely organic through time and environment. These architectural residues – fences, frames, facades, storage units, and other utilitarian constructs—are not monuments but remnants: quiet presences whose order is imperfect, whose function may have faded, and whose forms now carry the subtle distortions of weather, repair, and lived experience.
Through the act of drawing, these forms are reinvestigated, reimagined, and meticulously reworked. Pigment ink is laid down in rhythmic, sometimes obsessive lines, forming structured fields that echo the repetition of the original subject matter. These monochromatic surfaces are then interrupted – sometimes gently, sometimes with vivid insistence – by colour pencil intrusions. These colour fields do not merely decorate; they disrupt, accentuate, and offer moments of emotional or symbolic intensity. They highlight the friction between structure and spirit, control and instinct.
What emerges is a visual language of fragmentation – a patchwork of pattern that resists coherence while suggesting its own internal order. The term “archetype” in the title suggests an underlying form, a prototype or origin. Yet here, that origin appears fractured, displaced, and recombined. The works articulate the tension between the ideal and the imperfect, between the remembered and the reconstructed.
Poetically, these drawings reflect on the ephemerality of all constructed forms. They are contemplations of how things arise, shift, decay, and return. As with the natural world, what emerges from shadow eventually dissolves back into it. The built environment – like the body, like memory – is impermanent. Everything rises from the fertile earth, becomes structure, becomes surface, becomes residue, and eventually returns to dust.
Each work in Patchwork Archetype measures 31 x 41 cm and is rendered in ink and coloured pencil on archival paper. The scale invites intimacy, while the process rewards attention. These are not grand gestures but quiet acts of observation and reinvention – small rituals of seeing and making that honour the broken, the overlooked, and the beautifully unresolved.
morgan veness 