The Zephyrgraph is my attempt at creating a device which, relatively free from human interaction, will allow the wind and localized phenomenon to make marks on a surface which can be later interpreted. A pseudo-divinitory practice. A planchette without a hand.

Wind Figure from v.III Zephyrgraph — sumi ink and watercolor — Autumn 2023

To be honest I don’t recall the exact reason I started this artistic mission. It was in the early stages of the lockdown in LA in 2020. I was still recovering from a double wrist injury which had caused me to suddenly change my career trajectory from “working artist” to “someone who needs functional hands”. For 6 months I could barely lift a bottle of water, let alone create things in the fevered haste I once had. It was an agonizing transition. The idleness of my mind compounded the isolation of the outside world. If my notes from that time are anything to go by, I woke up one day and decided that since I couldn’t make art, that I would find someone who could. The wind, as ever, proved a vital ally.

My fascination with the wind goes back years, but it wasn't until this project that I began to reflect on it. Growing up in tornado alley I saw firsthand how devastating and gentle it could be. Following a visit to friends in Joplin, MO following the 2011 tornadoes, I was shown in wonder a home that had been reduced to matchsticks. A butterknife had been driven 4 inches into the trunk of an oak tree, but not 20 feet away the dining room table was still set for a meal that would never arrive, tablecloth barely askew. The following year the bookstore in my hometown burnt down, and I had vivid dreams for weeks afterwards of the buzzing words of those lost pages escaping into the sky as smoke and fluttering down into sleeping ears, jumbled and wild from their time in the air.

Now that I had identified this invisible mover as a co-conspirator, the question became “how”.

Thankfully I was not the first to make an attempt at this sort of contraption. Plenty of people far more creative than I had taken cracks at drawing with the wind. Inspired, I made attempts based on their designs. The results, while interesting, lacked some intangible vitality that I felt in the air before a thunderstorm. At worst, my early attempts didn’t work. At best, they were wind-powered spirographs -- reflections of the machine rather than the chaos of the breeze. Some other factor had to be introduced.

One of the only pictures of the version II Zephyrgraph, circa 2021

Over time and 4 (badly documented) prototypes I finally settled on something that allowed for the kind of work I wanted to make. Transportable, variable, and unpredictable.

The Zephyrgraph.

Understandably, it is still very much a work in progress. The artwork is equal parts the method of its creation, the resulting drawing, and the interpretations of the drawing. The V.III machine needed a redesign of the gear carrier which allows the table to turn. While in the shop it’s getting a new paint job as well, and I’m looking forward to unveiling it’s new incarnation once complete.

When appropriate to do so, I collect plants and materials at the sites I set up the Zephyrgraph. These I use to make paper and inks. The wind moves the pen, the materials are of the place, the genius loci, the spirits of the place, talk and are recorded. I long to make music from their words, to untangle the knots of their script. I need only learn their language enough to understand.