Tim Knowles’s creative practice incorporates chance, process, and performance into mark-making systems. Art is approached as a generative process aligned with the games and experiments of Situationist and Fluxus artists. In his automatic drawings, formal elements are open to mechanisms or phenomena beyond the artist’s control–seeking to reveal the hidden, or otherwise unnoticed, motion of objects. These projects capture ephemeral traces: of footsteps in the forest; the full moon’s reflection on undulating water; or intricate movements of a parcel traveling through the postal system. Marked by a romantic take on conceptualism, he travels with torches through the night landscape or attaches drawing tools as freehand extensions to the tips of tree branches to create a record of their movement. In collaboration with the wind and local weather conditions, calligraphic gestures and readings are rendered on paper. Nature becomes an eco-agent of sorts in automatic drawing.

In a new drawing series commissioned by the Blackwood Gallery entitled Ink on Paper Landscape, Knowles makes visible the geomorphological forces that perpetually mark the surface of the earth. Here, folded crushed paper acts as a landscape for the sudden flow of ink. The creative act is seemingly simple: load one pipette with ink, squeeze, and release. But the process the ink visualizes is complex. It is pulled by gravity, picks up speed, slows down, undulates, and, at times, cleaves. Like a signature, each system reveals the characteristics of an otherwise unnoticed physical experience.