drawing machines, landscape, water
This project is an exploration making drawings from the biological processes of wine fermentation.
Winemaker Gilles Lapalus from Maison Lapalus encouraged me to see the wine fermentation process as a dynamic energy event that could possibly inspire a drawing project.
As native yeasts colonise the sweet grape juice , they eat the sugar and produce CO2. As the CO2 gas bubbles out of the nascent wine, it moves a water-lock enough to motivate a drawing instrument.
Successive types of Yeast colonise the wine and influence the temperature and activity, along with environmental temperature changes. The different yeasts present in the air (think bread moulds and so on, where do they come from? ) are factors in giving the wine its many subtle flavour notes.
The drawing instrument has two controllable motors. The paper rotation can be set to speeds from one RPM upwards to very slow rotations of for EG once every 50 hours and slower. The drawings can be made to spiral so upwards of 200 hours can be fit to a sheet about 60 x 60 cm.
This is done with a finely controllable winch system which pulls the whole drawing surface across the table at about 1mm per hour .
This allows the whole drawing passage of yeast activity to be seen clearly without overlapping or overwriting, and the spiral of course is a fabulous life-symbol.
The recent series has created 18 drawings mostly of about 48 hours in duration. Rotation speeds however have varied from 4 minutes to 50 hours. for faster rotation spread and smaller paper sizes, the spiral winch mechanism is usually disengaged, and after 24 hours the rotation direction is reversed to allow for drawing spiral crossover.
These drawings are available for purchase, please email info@cameronrobbins.com
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