Esther Sibiude’s drawings are free verse poems that tune into the seething ground of a world that is three dimensional and alive. Like a good line of poetry, the line of a good drawing is bound to be a bit irregular. There may be a prevailing sense of rhythm or structure, but the murmurs of the human hand enhance the pattern, as in a movement of music that tends to keep a few things going at once—the steady heartbeat, the lyrical hooks, the contrapuntal variations and climaxes and silences. 

Sibiude has worked with colored pencil on paper  for the past five years. It’s a practical format—it fits on her desk—that lends itself to urgency and the archaic. Tracing accompanies the flow of thought; the fine lines record the slippage of forms, their pulse, accent, meter, and stress. Trace the name of the artist’s daughter, Frédérique, and the date of her conception, which hovers somewhere between the visible and the invisible in She wrote a letter to God to kill time (all works 2024). Sibiude’s drawings peer into the vast solitude of a child’s long daydream, a vaporous ether spread over a broad sheet of melody. Rather than try and describe a phenomenon, she extracts its sensation. This is her way of tuning into the phenomenology of evolution and breakdown that defines human existence, as she temporarily articulates what is ultimately unknowable. 

The forms build slowly out of formlessness. The heart swells and expands, possessed by a desire to map, scratch, and document, languorous and bored with ineffable stirrings and reveries. All of the questions randomly posed by children, Freud said, hinge on questions of origin. They are interrogations into time, interrogations of the whole, and interrogations of one’s position within that (w)hole. A question is movement. It demands something else, something more. Incomplete, a question affirms that the subject is only part.

—Hiji Nam