For Binion, the grid is a form of “handmade geometry”: a disciplined structure that allows images and information to be repeated, concealed and revealed. The Berkeley: Suite works develop this language through layered combinations of a 1970s self-portrait, a photograph of his childhood home, pages from his address book and copies of his Mississippi birth certificate. Personal history becomes part of the material of the print itself, embedded within geometric structures that can recall maps, plots of land or architectural frameworks.


In MAB: 1947: II, one of the works returns to the beginning of Binion’s own life. A photograph of the artist as a baby forms the basis of the composition, although the image is deliberately difficult to locate at first – the viewer has to look closely to find it beneath the layers of marks and geometry. What might otherwise read as a purely formal composition slowly discloses its autobiographical source.

Primary: Etching takes this process of abstraction further. Working from the reversal of the plate, Binion reduces the image to primary colours and black, tracing an uneven grid and removing any immediately recognisable iconography. This is the most abstract work of the group – a composition that leaves the viewer to construct their own story rather than offering a fixed image to read.


Across the selection, Binion’s repetitions create a space in which memory can be fragmented, hidden and recovered – where something intensely personal can sit inside an apparently rigorous abstract language.