The drawing is part of the series 'The Path of the Caterpillar', which was created after a journey through Canada that Karin van Dam made with Canadian / Taiwanese artist Ed Pien. They visited the mine aisles at Lethbridge and descended into a pit, an installation by artist Linda Duvall, where they became fascinated by the structures that caterpillars had made in the earth. In the drawing, Karin van Dam uses a thick graphic marker that turns them around to create a cluster of circles.
The shape is reminiscent of a zeppelin, but also refers to the crystal structure of coal (an intermediate form of graphite) and the cell structure that is present in nature at the micro level.