Drawing Fields is a series of large-scale works by Outpost Office exploring the spatial potential of notation. Each installation utilizes GPS-controlled painting robots to mark site-specific, building-size drawings at 1:1 scale. The drawing series employs techniques of measuring, delineating, and marking to investigate architecture as the dynamic performance of spatial instructions.
The notational assemblies of Drawing Fields challenge architecture’s tenets of permanence and material accumulation. The project eschews the waste often associated with temporary architecture. Each installation is water-soluble, non-toxic, and disappears with rain, sun, and growth. Within a few weeks, the site returns to its original state.
At Art Omi, Outpost Office will install Drawing Fields No. 6, the largest drawing in the series so far. Visitors will have the opportunity to both observe and inhabit the enormous graphic pattern throughout the drawing process. Drawing Fields No. 6 will critically revisit themes of intimate scale, horizontality, and minute gradation present in early portrayals of the Hudson River Valley landscape.
Outpost Office is a design practice based in Columbus, Ohio where principals and co-founders Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann teach at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. Outpost Office seeks new public audiences through experimental creative production ranging from the serious to the absurd, often simultaneously. Inventive applications of off-the-shelf tools and industrial-grade materials often characterize the practice's work. Their designs propose that architecture can be projective and impactful while at the same time inexpensive, temporal, and open-ended.