Fluid Speculations

I use watercolour to speculate about designed artefacts and technologies. I embrace the irregularity in the way pigment and water move around the paper, encouraging me to become comfortable with uncertainty in the design/research process. Drawing is thinking in action as ideas mutate, evolve and merge in playful, unpredictable ways, a form of sense making of the material world I explore, populated by bodies, machines, environments and technologies.
Machines and artefacts, traditionally drawn in CAD, with thin straight lines that reflect rational precision, can become defamiliarised when hand painted in watercolour. Drawing machines in watercolour provides me another way of understanding them, of rendering artefacts as uncanny, as strange yet familiar.

Through watercolour drawing, I often create connections between seeming unrelated artefacts. The fluidity of watercolour blurs the boundaries where one object ends and another starts, creating hybrids. This free association of artefacts invites critical discussions about the implications raised when certain technologies enter domains that are sensitive or emotionally charged.
Watercolour also enables me to speculate about technologies that deal with the body and its fluids. Breastfeeding pumps, urinals, menstrual cups and UTI test kits are artefacts that bridge what is inside and what is outside our bodies. I speculate about these artefacts through watercolour, using both drawing and the materiality of the drawing. I engage with themes about the boundaries of the body, its leakiness and the complex nature of machines that capture, measure, monitor or extract bodily fluids - which are quantifiable - and the associated intimate and subjective experiences that are more difficult to measure with precision.