The Drawing Bullion project treats drawings as a raw material. Each album in the series contains 20 compositions assembled, over a period of several years, from hundreds of drawings—culled from sketchbooks, preparatory studies, and aborted projects—to mimic the way precious metals are melted down and cast in measured blocks of bullion. The project examines what happens when individual expressions are decontextualized in favor of a metered supply of well-diversified compositions. The resulting albums are both a collection of drawings and a recollection (re-collection), a memory of bygone artistic acts amalgamated for the viewer, whose insights cast, shape, and form. Ultimately, each album is placed in an unassuming and unlabeled white box, which serves to reenforce the albums’s fungible and modular qualities, accentuating both the album as bullion and the homogenous context of the drawings therein.

The individual albums take their titles from a series of 19th century ink tablets from the workshop of Jian Guzhai, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The titles are chosen for both the evocative potential of the imagined space and to connect the albums to comparable aesthetic trends in the scholar arts of China, Korea, and Japan, where the raw materials of painting—the ink tablet, the brushes, the ink grinding stones—became art objects in their own right. 

Many of the drawings are inscribed with “hallmarks,” based on the stamps that assayers, goldsmiths, and silversmiths use to identify and underwrite their wares. The purpose of a hallmark is to impart value and authority upon an object, yet throughout the albums such marks are dislocated from their original use, parodying the authority of the assayer and fiat evaluation.