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Limbo

Limbo - An Expanding Atlas of Subjectivity’ (2011) is a body of work that reinvents the practice of observational drawing for a digital and socially-networked world. Limbo creates new modes of drawing and dissemination - utilising digital media in both the creation and the distribution sketches.

Wandering the world over the past thirteen years, Faithfull has consistently made observational sketches on an electronic device that record his presence at a particular place and moment, somewhere on the surface of Earth. Since 2011, whenever Faithfull makes a new drawing it is immediately added to an online database and instantly dispatched out to the world via the ‘Limbo’ iPhone App, Twitter, Facebook and the Limbo website – each drawing being received by an audience of over 3,000. The App also uses GPS and Faithfull’s hand drawn maps to ‘locate’ each of the 1000+ drawings - covering locations as diverse as Antarctica and the Hackney Road.

As well as electronic dissemination, Limbo reinvents physical modes of publishing through the bookwork ‘An Expanding Atlas of Subjectivity’. Each version of this hand-sewn bookwork is a paper archive that captures one particular moment from this database - each time a new book is ordered the latest drawings being automatically added. The book of 1000+ pages constitutes a personal atlas of the world - a map of time and space as experienced by one individual, on an ongoing basis.

The complete Limbo database has also appeared physically in galleries including three stagings of the solo exhibition 'An Expanding Atlas of Subjectivity' - first at National Gallery, Berlin, (2010), then at ArtConnexion, Lille, France (2012) and finally at Phoenix Art Centre, Leicester (2012) and featured in numerous group exhibitions including 'Yonder' at PICA, Perth, Australia (2012) and 'Re-Viewing the Landscape: A Contemporary Response’ at Compton Verney (2013).