Research Project
Year: 2025
Authors:
Luca Caiaffa;
Monstera;
Winds;
Sun;
Insects;
Shadows;
Other presences
Delicious Monster(s)
Drawing Experiment and Essay
5 December 2025, between 12:30 pm and 1:00 pm, Grafton, Tāmaki Makaurau
Delicious Monster(s) explores drawing not as representation, but as a process of becoming-with other bodies, materials, and movements; as a collaborative process shaped through embodied attention and temporality. On 5 December 2025, between 12:30 pm and 1:00 pm, in my front yard in Grafton, Auckland, I made a drawing ‘with’ our large-leafed Monstera plant. It was a hot summer afternoon and the concrete paving was warm from the morning sun. A persistent wind moved through the yard in irregular gusts: sometimes barely perceptible, sometimes strong enough to bend the Monstera stems and press its leaves into one another with a dry rubbing sound. Birds, cicadas, and distant traffic collaborated with a constant background hum, and occasional voices drifted over the fence from neighbouring gardens.
Fig. 1 Luca Caiaffa, 2025. Delicious Monster(s) drawing and the Monstera’s shadows.
I sat low to the ground with two large sheets of paper spread directly over the rough concrete. I used soft pastels in dark green, ochre, dusty orange, and earth brown, alongside graphite sticks, compressed charcoal, and watercolour. I began by tracing the shadows cast by the Monstera’s leaves as they shifted with the wind and the slow movement of the sun. At first I tried to follow the contours precisely, moving quickly around the edges of the shadows before they slipped away. But the shadows kept stretching, folding, breaking apart, and transforming. The rhythm of the drawing continually shifted; sometimes I lagged behind the shadows completely, finishing a line after the leaf had already moved elsewhere. At other moments I anticipated movement too early, tracing shapes that had not yet arrived. There was a slight but constant mismatch between seeing and marking. During moments of stillness, the shadows seemed briefly stable and invited me to slow down my own movements over the paper surface. Then a sudden gust would force rapid movements across the page. At the same time, the ground textures pushed back through the paper, making some pastel marks rough and broken while others became unexpectedly smooth. Insects—small bugs, ants, and once a slow-moving beetle—crossed the paper surface, interrupting and redirecting my gestures. In a kind of dance, my hand alternated between control and improvisation, precision and approximation. Each mark registered only a fleeting alignment between my body, the plant, light, and wind. As I attempted to trace the shadows, the leaves appeared on the paper not once but many times—slightly displaced, thickened, blurred, doubled. Some outlines overlapped into dense dark clusters while others dissolved into faint fragments and the drawing accumulated through these different registers.
Fig. 2 Luca Caiaffa, 2025. Delicious Monster(s) drawing and the Monstera’s shadows. Detail
The drawing process shifted from a form of capturing the plant to a form of attunement with it. Instead of projective representation, the drawing unfolded through attention and correspondence: following movements already in motion rather than imposing or fixing a form upon them. In this sense, the drawing was less about producing an image and more about remaining connected to changing elements and relations. The marks were negotiated; they arrived through delay, interruption, and adjustment. Even what could be called mistakes became generative, and missing the shadows often produced stranger and more compelling forms than accurately tracing them. As the drawing progressed, the familiar split-leaf geometry of the Monstera became more unstable. Repeated leaves spread across the page, and the plant thickened into something excessive and almost unrecognisable: an entangled mass of overlapping contours, smudges, blurs, and textures. Justine Clark’s discussion of ‘smudges and smears’ as excessive to representational architectural drawing helps to understand what emerged through this process:
Smudges and smears lie outside this mimetic role. Operating as indexical signs, they refer not to the building represented/projected, but to the actions and efforts of making, of process. Smudges are excessive and superfluous to the expectation of drawing as a transparent transcription of a putative reality. [1]In Delicious Monster(s), the marks seemed to vibrate between traces and accidents, figure and process, resisting representational control and refusing to settle into either. The drawing did not represent the plant; instead, it reflected and expanded the Monstera’s continual transformation through movement and repetition.
Fig. 3 Luca Caiaffa, 2025. Delicious Monster(s) drawing and the Monstera’s shadows. Detail
The title Delicious Monster(s) directly refers to the plant’s scientific name, in Latin: Monstera deliciosa. Yet the monstrous here exceeds the plant itself. It names something about the drawing’s process: the way the image escapes singular authorship and stable identity. The monstrous is not a matter of distortion or exaggeration, but of ontological excess—when the drawing reveals latent relations and produces forms that cannot be entirely traced back to any fixed object. These forms emerged through accumulation, divergence, misalignment; they were neither fully authored nor fully external. They hovered between shadow, plant, movement, and mark without stabilising into a single readable image. There was something unruly in them, something that exceeded the categories through which I initially related to the plant and the drawing. The ‘monsters’ relate to this multiple temporal and material states that emerged through the Monstera’s movements, shadows, and repeated inscriptions on the page.
Fig. 4 Luca Caiaffa, 2025. Delicious Monster(s) drawing and the Monstera’s shadows. Detail
Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming’ provides a way of thinking about the drawing’s continual transformation: a condition in which forms never resolve into fixed identities, but unfold through variation, movement, and difference. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari connect ‘becoming’ with the monstrous as a rupture from stable and predetermined forms:
If becoming-animal takes the form of a Temptation, and of monsters aroused in the imagination by the demon, it is because it is accompanied, at its origin as in its undertaking, by a rupture with the central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become established. [2]
In Delicious Monster(s), the drawing did not organise the world into legible parts; instead, ‘monstrous’ forms spilled into one another, remaining unresolved and slightly out of place. I felt this directly each time graphite, pastel, or brush touched the page. With every mark attempting to trace the plant, its shadows had already shifted elsewhere and no image could stabilise long enough to become definitive. Drawing revealed itself as an inherently delayed practice: continually exceeding its own attempts to capture something already disappearing. This delay produced a strange temporal thickness within the work. Multiple positions of the same leaf coexisted simultaneously, compressing a monstrous variety of moments into a single surface. In this sense, the drawing captured its own duration, becoming a visible record of temporality, adjustment, and repetition.
Fig. 5 Luca Caiaffa, 2025. Delicious Monster(s) drawing and the Monstera’s shadows. Detail
The pleasure of the drawing—its ‘deliciousness’—emerged precisely within this instability. The drawing was delicious not because it was beautiful, but because it sustained a particular mode of embodied engagement. As philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, drawing’s:
... pleasure is the sensual pleasure (jouissance) of this unfolding, or the pleasure of the unfolding itself inasmuch as it invents, finds, and summons itself further, projects onto the trace that has nevertheless not preceded it. [3]In drawing Delicious Monster(s), there was pleasure in following the moving shadows, in failing to catch them precisely, in continually trying again; pleasure in the friction between pastel and rough paper; pleasure in the shifting relation between concentration and distraction while I waited for the sun to cast shadows or the wind to slow down. The process was absorbing in a way that dissolved ordinary distinctions between attention and drifting. I became intensely aware of small variations: slight changes in wind speed, subtle differences in pressure between graphite and pastel, the cooling effect of brief cloud cover, the sound of leaves rubbing together when a gust arrived. The process generated a heightened sensitivity to relations that usually remain peripheral. In this sense, deliciousness refers to appetite more than satisfaction: a desire to continue drawing, responding, adjusting, and remaining within the unfolding of the situation.
Fig. 6 Luca Caiaffa, 2025. Delicious Monster(s) drawing and the Monstera’s shadows. Detail
When the drawing eventually stopped, little had been resolved: the yard remained full of moving shadows; pastel dust covered my hands; and the paper now carried smudges, marks, fragments of leaves, and traces of dirt from the ground beneath it. Yet the act of drawing had altered something in how I perceived my front yard in Grafton and its presences. The garden no longer appeared as a stable arrangement of objects, but as a dense field of relations, movements, interruptions, and correspondences continually forming and dissolving. Perhaps this is the knowledge the drawing produced: not objective knowledge of the plant or the space as stable objects, but a form of attunement to their continual transformation. It offered to me a way of noticing how forms emerge collaboratively through bodies, materials, weather, duration, and accident. As a lens, Delicious Monster(s) does not capture the world or translate it into clarity; instead, it enables a sustained attention to instability so that ‘monstrous’ relations can become perceptible and ‘delicious.’
Fig. 7 Luca Caiaffa, 2025. Delicious Monster(s) drawing and the Monstera’s shadows. Detail
Delicious Monster(s) ultimately became less a drawing of a plant than a drawing of becoming-with: with shadows, heat, surfaces, delays, interruptions, and movements that exceeded my control. It contributes to drawing practices that do not seek resolution, but remain open to instability, collaboration, and continual transformation. A drawing practice that follows the world, its beings and spaces, not as fixable images, but as continuous transformations.
References
[1]. Justine Clark, “Smudges, Smears and Adventitious Marks,” Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, no. 4 (2019): 1-9, 1
[2]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian Massumi (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 247
[3]. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing (2009), trans. by Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 22