It's not about making a mark. At least it's not only about making a mark, though that might be part of the process. It's about seeing, beginning to see, catching a glimpse: viewing something through representating it in a different medium. What's in the drawing may or may not exist in the 'real' world. But on the page or screen, it comes alive. New objects. New moments. New worlds.

I started drawing when I was eight or nine. I suppose in a way I was pregnant with strikingly beautiful images: worlds within that wanted out. Fantastical landscapes and vivid scenes woven from the books I'd read, the films I'd seen, the video games I'd played. They were so real in my mind, such perfectly rendered imaginary pictures, that I got curious. I wanted not only to have seen them in my head; I wanted to be able to see them in front of me, to touch them and keep adding detail to them over time. I knew what I wanted to portray, but wasn't quite sure how to go about representing those places and feelings and visions. So I made an obvious move. I picked up a pen.

Ruskin summed it up pretty well: "Draw what you see, but know what you see, then draw what you know you see." I put myself through a drawing regime. It started with re-drawing a Sunday Times cartoon, then took me via drawings of human anatomy to studies of other artists' work. How did they convey different materialities or atmospheres? I copied photographs to get a better understanding of compositional dynamics, and found myself forgetting about the story of the video games because I got too caught up in their visual aspects. And slowly, those worlds within started to come alive on the page.

That kind of representation - of what's there or what's not there - is one aspect of drawing. But there is also the aspect of drawing as a visual language that communicates scales, views, ideas, textures. I went to architecture school, first in Oxford, then in London. Studying architecture through drawing makes you realise how constructing an image of something in two or three dimensions can become a device not just for representation, but for the creation of ideas and concepts. An abstract drawing suddenly becomes material, it becomes a tool of translation, a translation of three-dimensional, fictional structures through a series of seductive drawings that make you understand a language that doesn't exist until you draw it. 

I like sharply pointed instruments, be they pens or computers, circular saws or screwdrivers. No matter whether they make marks or shuffle digital pices of information around, they allow you to add to the world through drawing, to make it more real, more like what you see in your mind's eye. The translator listens to the world around him, then decides to make up certain parts himself: he adds some colour here, deletes a shadow there. I've been translating, and deliberately mis-translating, images ever since I first picked up that pen. Many worlds have come alive. I hope you'll be around as the next ones unfold.