Curated by Maria Hinel

"For this curated selection, I would like to work with the theme of a diagram and diagrammatic thinking as a way of making sense, making fun, as well as highlighting the limits of human knowledge."


Featuring artworks by: Mary Yacoob, Marcia Teusink, Lucy Austin, Olivia Hicks and Carrie Stanley.

Read more about these artists in the Artist Gallery and connect with featured members & the curator by leaving comments in the Axis Community. 

World as a Diagram by Maria Hinel 

A diagram is, fundamentally, a relational thing. It proposes that nothing exists entirely in isolation – each element is tethered to everything else with a network of lines that denote movement or connection. Operating as a mode of reasoning, rather than representation, a diagram is therefore rooted in time, whilst remaining intrinsically elastic.

Bringing together works by five contemporary artists, World as a Diagram considers the interaction between the processes of making a diagram and making a mark. Drawing a line or applying pigment in abstract shapes can be at once an intuitive gesture and an act of deliberation, allowing connections to emerge across the surface. In this sense, the mark becomes both image and notation: a trace of the artist’s movement through thought, memory and perception. As the artist Amy Sillman put it in her essay titled Notes on the Diagram, “the process of making something go away from “realness” to abstraction seemed like a big memory-diagram – things seen and then registered in the mind’s eye undergoing a process of being stripped clean, or becoming a bit tattered and distorted as they move off into your past.”

The works in this selection in distinct ways evince the entanglement of image and thought, personal and social history, memory and imagination. Mary Yacoob’s Aeolian City traces urban wind-flow diagrams, making visible an imagined environmental push and pull between architecture and atmosphere. Marcia Teusink’s Extraction Abstractions begin with British Empire maps of natural-resource extraction, translating systems of colonial and economic organisation into painterly fields in which the logic of the map persists even as its geographical specificity begins to dissolve. In Lucy Austin’s abstract works that meld drawing and collage, dynamic lines in black ink dance across translucent colour fields. They coalesce into enigmatic systems of shapes that remain abstract, yet resolutely echo figures present in everyday life, evoking a vibrant system of associations and thoughts that form the human experience.

In Olivia Hicks’s Human Mountains, the human body is mutable and pliant, now emerging from the soil, now transforming into animal or plant forms. Each element in the work appears in motion, as if stemming from a diagram of a continually evolving neural network. Carrie Stanley’s Carapace, meanwhile, operates as a kind of memory-diagram: the memory of a structure made of oyster shells translated into a continuous line, a vision of a shell or shelter. Their collaborative performance titled Cat’s Cradle evokes a diagram traced in space: thread passes between two bodies, denoting shared experiences and producing a drawing held in tension. Together, these works complicate the notion of an abstract gesture, and propose the world not as a fixed image, but as a network of phenomena captured in visual form across time. 

About the Curator - Maria Hinel

Maria Hinel is a London-based independent curator and writer. Her curatorial work focuses on the intersections between art and philosophy, with a particular focus on human and non-human relations, language, identity and gender. As an independent curator, Maria has organised exhibitions across public spaces, institutions and galleries. Her recent projects include Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Hypha 1 Poultry, London, 2026), The Pleasure of Misuse (Royal Society of Sculptors, London, 2025); The Middle Voice (Shtager&Shch, London, 2024). She holds an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld and a BA in Philosophy and Art History from UCL.