Geordie Millar’s practice investigates the limits of representing the nonhuman through drawing, positioning observation as both a foundation and a site of instability. Rooted in the study of animal anatomy and traditions of natural history illustration, his work departs from strict empiricism to examine how perception is mediated, partial, and constructed.

Working in charcoal, Millar engages drawing as a tactile and materially responsive process. The medium’s instability—its susceptibility to smudging, erasure, and dispersal—becomes central to the work. Images are built through contact: rubbing, lifting, dragging, and reworking the surface so that the drawing records not only the animal form, but the physical encounter between hand, material, and ground. Marks remain provisional, accumulating and breaking down, producing figures that oscillate between emergence and dissolution.

This sensitivity to movement, atmosphere, and sequential perception is informed in part by Millar’s experience working in film. A cinematic sensibility structures the work: images unfold as fragments, akin to frames that suggest continuity while resisting resolution.

The animal is not treated as symbol or illustration, but as a presence that exceeds human systems of knowledge. Engaging with posthumanist concerns, the work resists anthropocentric modes of representation, instead staging encounters defined by distance and uncertainty.

Millar is also a teacher, and this long-standing pedagogical engagement informs the work’s sustained attention to observation, process, and critical reflection. Drawing becomes both a practice and a form of inquiry—one that emphasizes looking as an active, embodied, and unresolved act.

Ultimately, the work asks what it means to observe and attempt to know the nonhuman while maintaining its irreducible opacity.