B3-551 Flight Study 4 by Peter Burke is a carbon drawing that continues the artist’s sustained investigation into the staircase as an abstract system of movement, transition, and psychological experience. Within Burke’s broader practice, the flight of stairs functions as a recurring motif through which ideas of ascent, descent, and passage are explored across both sculptural and drawn forms, each medium revealing a different register of meaning. Executed in carbon, the drawing emphasises tonal depth, immediacy of gesture, and the subtle accumulation of layered mark-making. The composition is constructed through shifting densities of shadow and line, suggesting an architectural space that is never fully resolved. Rather than depicting a fixed staircase, the work evokes its underlying structure through rhythm and interval, where steps are implied as moments of passage within an indeterminate field. As with the previous studies in the series, Flight Study 4 reduces the staircase to its essential conceptual logic: a sequence of transitions that can be read simultaneously as upward and downward movement. This ambiguity is central to Burke’s approach, allowing the work to hold multiple possibilities in suspension. The staircase becomes less a physical object and more a diagram of lived experience, shaped by memory, perception, and psychological orientation. In contrast to Burke’s steel and gold leaf sculptures, which engage directly with material presence and surface transformation, the carbon drawings operate within a more introspective and ephemeral register. Here, form is not constructed but suggested, emerging through the act of looking and dissolving through shifts in tonal pressure. The absence of industrial materiality allows for a heightened sensitivity to spatial uncertainty and mental projection. Measuring 45 x 45 cm, Flight Study 4 maintains the disciplined clarity of a working study while extending the conceptual scope of the series. It functions as both investigation and reflection, holding the staircase in a state of flux where meaning is continuously generated through perception, movement, and the viewer’s engagement with its evolving spatial ambiguity over time.