Kite Diagrams

A solo exhibition by Jonah Sack

Mezzanine Gallery: 18.06.26 - 30.07.26 

How are kites like diagrams?

Minimal elements held in tension, operating in blank space, tracking invisible forces. They are diagrams at play.

But these kites are too heavy to fly – they are suspended, held between floating and falling.

The drawings of stacked shipping containers also toy with ideas of weight and the ethereal. Drawn in coloured pencil on transparent drafting film, they are simultaneously solid and insubstantial.

Tim Ingold writes about the distinction between two modes of construction, two models for how the world is put together. The more familiar one is of the world as a structure composed of building blocks. A modular, Lego-like world. The other is of the world as a network (or in Ingold's terms, a meshwork) of lines and intersections. The knot becomes the key logic of the structure, rather than the stack.

In these works, the two models are in conversation. Containers may look like building blocks but their purpose is to circulate, travelling the surface of the ocean on a network of lines and nodes. Kites move with the wind but remain anchored in place.

Other works are material fragments: offcuts of paper with graph patterns or floor rubbings, cards with geometric drawings overlaid by scribbles. Thought becoming thing.

Diagrams don't dissolve into pure information. Their attempts to map intangible forces depend on their material embodiment — in pigment, paper, plastic and wood.