b'Windows onto the Infinitetrol occurs instead as a natural part of the making process. When she is in that process, though, it is all-consuming, so that she is repeatedly surprised at the end of a drawing. Margot almost always works in series in which each drawing is constructed in the same format and with the same colour palette. Each series corresponds, she says, to a feeling or a past story, a moment in life, a sensation, a perception, a construction, an elaboration. She likens their beginning to starting a machine: Once the engine is sparked, I cant stop myself. One drawing leads to another. Like many visionary artists, Margot creates compulsively: When I begin some-thing its everything or nothing. When I started drawing every day, I would wake up and the first thing I would do would be to take up my pen and con-tinue to work on the drawing that I had left off at one in the morning the pre-vious day. It was completely obsessional. But interruptions to the flow of action can be a problem: I lose the thread and the drawing cant be finished. Its frus-trating and painful. The Utopian Construction series has a feel of architectural facades, bringing to mind cathedrals like Reims in France, or temples like Borobudur in Java. Margot herself is reminded of monumental doors, perhaps, she says, with a se-cret passage to enter, with a small door opening into a secret space where only I can be. Like a sort of locked brain space for which I have the key. Each Utopian Construction consists of a matrix of geometric shapes that seems at first glance to be bilaterally symmetrical. However, viewers become quickly aware of deviations from any strict symmetry. Changes to details emerge in the progressive journey from first blocking out in pencil to growth of individual el-ements in ink. Similarly, at first glance these pictures look like geometric ab-stractions. Yet even from a distance there seems to be something living and animated in them. Close up viewers quickly become aware of figurative ele-ments, symbols and often text. Closer examination also often reveals a rich and complex surface texture whose very physicality somehow points further to the impalpable realities being communicated. 8'