‘The Virtual Nation of Mammon’ is an artwork that appropriates and abstracts the form of a line graph in polished brass. The source material for the work is drawn from data presented in economist Thomas Piketty’s book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ and its discussion of the continued world-wide rise of the billionaire class. This ‘virtual’ nation of globalised citizens has become the subject of increasing media attention as their wealth continues to grow in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. As a work of creative practice, ‘The Virtual Nation of Mammon’ takes the familiar formal device of the line graph and removes the labelled axes, rendering the lines technically meaningless, but in their essential form still ‘readable’. Abstracted from their original context, the lines themselves become symbolic narrative drawings. Together these line drawings tell the story of change over time; with only the work’s title, choice of material, and its austere presentation as prompts to the narrative’s details. In this distilled form, the work explores the potential of appropriation, abstraction, and de-contextualisation to act as critical drawing and sculptural strategies. It uses these approaches and the basic formal conventions of the line graph to suggest ambiguous narratives and in turn creatively respond to broader social and economic concerns.