Personal Work:
    Sketchbooks



    Selected School Work:
    Topographic models Architecture & design


    Contact:
    grace.cookston@gmail.com
    LinkedIn













Currently working on...
21st & Bryant Street




Red Victorian
San Francisco, January 2025
Hayes & Masonic
San Francisco, January 2025
Untitled Gouache Painting 
San Francisco, January 2025
Wired
San Francisco, December 2024
Sketches & paintings from a trip to Healdsburg, CA
July 2024

Liminal Schuman
November 2025
Back From Down Under
September, 2025

Piccinos
March 2025

Circuit Breakers- Some Thoughts


At 22nd and Illinois St, Dogpatch San Francisco, there is a city power plant across from my workplace. One summer afternoon, I spent hours looking at this intersection and the shapes within. The shape that intrigued me the most, I learned was the substation circuit breaker. Many of my sketchbook pages have accompanying notes, and this is a selected one. 


My environment is technologically designed, from bus stations with real-time schedules to all the phones around me. Everywhere are technological artifacts and systems of transport, communication, and power. But where really is the nervous system of the nation?

I see phone and power lines overhead- views and arteries of urbanity, but who decided that the majority of the wires would be buried under the cement? I think about tree roots, and their spread, as ancient precursors to the electrical infrastructure overhead. To see this tree for its root system is analogous to seeing the electricity we generate and consume for the overhead lines in our environment. To see the forest (as grid) for the trees (as power lines) is to appreciate the lines as a series of material artifacts, structures with a technological function, social meaning, and aesthetic (form) that is predicated by function.

The roots underground and lines overhead are necessary links in their respective systems, yet “tree” and “electricity” often attract warmer visions and more generous associations. Similarly, the local electric system, a node of which radiates from the substation attached to the lattice steel tower on the hill, almost instantaneously transfers electrons to millions of lights and machines.

Both root systems and wire systems extend from tree trunks and wooden arms, yet unlike the organic shoots that burrow beneath this living specimen, the engineered, metallic threads overhead must hide in plain sight, and when such structures fail to hide, when the lines on the horizon do poke into attention, they are often loathed.



xThe power lines transmit energy, and energy in the anthropocene has ethical consequences. At face value, the ethical dilemma posed by power lines pits the need to build more transmission lines (to deliver more renewable energy, reduce CO2 emissions, and slow climate change) against the desire to protect the environment from the unsightly, dangerous blight caused by sweeping wires and looming pylons. Many ethical strains are enmeshed in public engagements with electric infrastructure.

Power lines are actors, ones that convey a certain agency. The lines, and the values attached to them, create place as well as intersect landscape.


In drawing these structures and thinking about why I feel so drawn to draw these structures, I’ve come to understand them as urban analogues to natural forms: power lines as branches, underground cables as roots. Infrastructure is a part of our material culture, designed, placed, and lived with. Like trees, these systems are alive with energy. And like roots, their true extent often lies hidden from view.