Dramatic Architecture

How much space does a story take up?

Dramatic Architecture Made Visible is an ongoing body of work that translates plays and screenplays into physical abstract artworks.

A custom-built system analyses the structure beneath a dramatic text: its acts and scenes, who speaks, for how long, how characters interact, where conversations fracture and how the rhythm of the work changes over time. These relationships are translated according to a consistent set of rules into colour, geometry and space.

The resulting image is not an illustration of the story. It is a map of how the story is built.

These digital structures then leave the computer and are reconstructed by hand through painting and printmaking. A process that begins with measurement and code becomes slow, physical and imperfect again — introducing material, labour and the decisions of the maker.

Individual scenes or dramatic sections can become separate works in their own right. Their unusual proportions and internal structures are determined by the source rather than designed simply for aesthetic effect. When the individual works are brought back together, they reconstruct the larger architecture of the play or film from which they came.

A viewer can therefore encounter each piece first as an abstract composition. Its source may only become apparent afterwards. A colourful, apparently ordered painting might represent an exchange filled with fear, violence or conflict; another might record silence, intimacy or a fleeting conversation.

The project is ultimately concerned with translation: language into geometry, time into space, and digital analysis into physical objects.

Rather than asking what a story looks like, the work asks what remains when its words are removed but its structure is preserved.

And, finally:

How much physical space does a dramatic work occupy when its architecture is made visible?