Artist Sam Griffin on how he draws

For Sam Griffin, drawing is a catalyst for both hypothesis and comprehension

I've always been interested in looking at architecture as a manifestation of our desire to make sense of and improve the world around us, and drawing has often seemed to be a fittingly heuristic antecedent to this process.

As a primary means of notating a thought process, drawing provides a tool for proposition, for making sense of something you don't understand yet or ever could - it is a catalyst for both hypothesis and comprehension.

The American artist Roni Horn spoke recently about drawing being neither right nor wrong, which I think is one of its greatest strengths - as a medium it allows you to be exacting, as in the case of my own work, yet at the same time it can rarely escape its own sense of fragility.

My recent drawings explore the relationship between symbolic and architectural arrangements and meaning - often in terms of the beliefs and ideas that underpinned the history of these structures and forms.

In Zeitgeber, the focus of the drawing is the old State Department for Roads building in Tbilisi, Georgia - a building designed to mimic the canopy-level habitat that trees provide for their inhabitants. Flanking this image are two symbols taken from Le Poeme de L'Angle Droit, a lyrical treatise produced by Le Corbusier exploring the relationship between ourselves and the formal compositions that make up the natural and man-made world. Hence the title of the piece, which refers to features of our environment, such as sunlight that can have the power to regulate our natural internal rhythms.

In New Safe Confinement, the geometric pattern is made up of the shape of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Projection - a flat shape that when folded up creates a polyhedral, 3D map of the world. This form is surrounded by several of Fuller's synergetic projections - examples of his attempt to use geometry as a vernacular to transcribe human experience. The title of this piece is a reference to the monolithic structure that will eventually house the burnt-out remains of the reactor core at Chernobyl, Ukraine - the site of the worst nuclear accident in history.

Sam Griffin was born in Oxford in 1979. He is represented by Schirman & De Beaucé, Paris