I am an artist working with drawing. I am currently (2025) a part-time MFA student in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. I also work part-time as a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at University of Leeds. My art practice is not fundamentally computational although it can involve writing code as a means to an end. The walking drawings relate to concerns with the representation of space and the idea that mapping using numerical coordinates often fails to capture important aspects of human spatial experience.
I can be contacted at johngstell (at) gmail (dot) com. You can find me on Instagram as johngstell.
The long drawing above (you need to scroll to see all of it) was commissioned as part of a show called "What if? . . . " at the Holden Gallery, Manchester School of Art (June 2025).
I make drawings by walking and recording my gestures as I move. The image consists of handmade marks recorded digitally and realized as a digital print 6m long. The piece is installed in a kind of passage space which reflects the origin of the work in a walk.
Three drawings made by walking along the same route on different evenings in April 2025. Together there are several thousand individual gestures collected here. Making the drawings is like making a map, but one that depends partly on how I personally move as well as partly on the features of the environment that anyone would experience. They can be read from the top downwards.
These three drawings were realized as digitally printed images on paper each 300cm high and 100cm wide. They were shown, as in the image, in the exhibition SRISHTI at The Hot Bed Press in Salford, (9 to 19 May 2025)
This drawing was made at night and the street lights are used rather like a drawing tool. The drawings are ultimately digital images, but the marks come from actual physical movements. In this case about 600 individual images are assembled to yield the final drawing.