gilgamesh

2025

Gilgamesh is the culmination of several years of speculative drawing practice and research. The drawing emerges from a broader series investigating a Hejduk-esque world populated by obscure, nonhuman architectural beings, entities whose forms oscillate between the familiar and the incomprehensible. Within this speculative taxonomy, architecture is treated less as static enclosure and more as a class of animated, compound organisms.

The drawing brings together conventions from architectural representation such as projection, annotation, and diagrammatic scaffolding with techniques more commonly associated with pre-modern depictions of mythical creatures. The image is constructed entirely through linework, hatching, and stippling, producing a continuous field of density and texture without tonal fill.

At its center is Gilgamesh, an architectural compound kaiju. It appears as a sprawling, kinetic assemblage of architectural fragments, infrastructural organs, and mechanical armatures. Ribbed frames, laddered elements, turbines, conduits, and scaffold-like structures accumulate into a dense architectural anatomy that feels both constructed and evolved. Rather than resolving into a single object, the entity reads more like a distributed apparatus, part organism, part machine, part fragment of city.

The figure occupies and subtly distorts a latent orthogonal field that registers faintly across the background. Arcs, trajectories, and projection lines extend outward from the body, suggesting vectors of motion, calibration, or energetic discharge. These traces imply that the entity is not fixed but actively negotiating the spatial field in which it resides.

Gilgamesh therefore exists somewhere between discrete object and atmospheric condition. It appears as a concentrated mass of architectural instrumentation whose influence radiates outward through gradients of line, trajectory, and particulate dispersion. Its origin remains deliberately ambiguous, simultaneously ancient, extraterrestrial, and futuristic. In this sense the drawing sits somewhere between mythological illustration, architectural speculation, and a kind of mechanical taxonomy.

A sequel to the Compound Kaiju series. 60”x90”