If we want to know how our world is constructed, where we are and where we’re heading, we need look no further than the vast database of international patent applications.

Patents are documents approved by government authorities that grant ownership rights to inventors for a set period, especially the sole right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention. They exist for every conceivable aspect of life and death.

Pages of technical and  conceptual notes are often accompanied by graphic illustrations and I became fascinated by the challenge of visually representing these complex ideas through simple, hand-drawn black lines.

I began to think of these illustrations as the true genetic code of our civilization. As an echo of the Golden Records sent into interstellar space by NASA in the 1970s, I engraved them onto golden plaques, housed in artist’s frames of my own invention. Instead of being sent into space to hopefully be seen by some imagined alien life-form in a distant future, they are to remain on Earth, to be seen and contemplated in the present.