Desire Paths is a 64-card drawing system that explores rhythm, structure and disruption in mark-making.
Each card introduces a prompt - a gesture, a qualitative direction or disruptive action - that guides how marks are made and how they interact. Through repetition, variation and attention, the system encourages practice beyond habitual ways of making and to discover new relationships between form, movement and perception.
The cards can be used individually or in combination to generate unexpected interactions between marks. The process shifts drawing away from representation and toward observation, experimentation and embodied thinking.
Rather than instructing what to draw, Desire Paths offers a framework for how drawing unfolds, inviting participants to follow emerging paths of attention, structure and response.
Desire Paths is a drawing and contemplation system housed in a 64-card deck and companion booklet. Each card introduces a prompt within four categories - scaffolding, texture, force and disruption - offering prompts that shape how marks are made and how they interact. Used alone or in combination, the cards create shifting structures where gestures merge, layer and collide.
Named after the informal paths worn into grass through repeated footsteps, Desire Paths approaches drawing as a process of attention rather than representation. Through rhythm, repetition and improvisation, it invites participants to follow emerging patterns and explore relationships between movement, perception and environment.
Developed during a year living in Mexico City, the project began as a way of metabolising the density of the city through drawing. Repeated gestures gradually formed an informal alphabet of marks whose interactions suggested a language beyond words - one that speaks through the body before the mind.
The deck distills this process into a tool for experimentation: a way to exercise perception, disrupt habitual patterns of making, and explore drawing as a form of thinking through the hand.