Vagus
Graphite and gouache on paper, 2026
63 x 90cm
The vagus nerve is the longest of the autonomic nervous system — descending from the brainstem into the visceral organs, carrying signals that never reach consciousness. You cannot feel it working. You only discover it when it stops.
In this drawing, a spinal column coils downward in a slow helical torsion. The upper vertebrae are rendered with near-tactile precision; moving downward, the structure softens and dissolves into something more root-like, as though anatomy were reverting to an earlier form of itself. Around this central axis, a single continuous filament traces a wide elliptical orbit — not gripping, not binding, only accompanying.
A vertical white stripe cuts through the entire composition without deviation, belonging to a different system than the organic marks around it. A signal from elsewhere, indifferent to what it interrupts.
Traces does not treat the body as anatomy but as infrastructure for the invisible — what carries without being seen, what regulates without being asked. The mark here is not description. It is attention directed toward what has always been present and never quite visible.
