signatures/thoughts
In the signatures series it is the nature of the book as a form and as an object that intrigues me: the intimacy of our physical relation to it and its object nature wed to space and time. In this group of works I use the format of a signature, the drawn object spanning one page to the next. The movement from page to page proposes the element of time into the viewing of a single object, allowing us to understand a small drawing through time in a way similar to how we experience a thing or an object as it sits in space. The loft of the page gives a breath to the form suggesting movement from side to side to create an inside as well as an outside, which confirms the work’s association with the world of objects.
While the works on paper presented here reiterate
the rectangular shape of the support, I want to make that rectangularity
neutral--a ground against which to see irregularities, which become pictorial.
In making the images, I use layers of ink that responds to the particulars of the
paper surfaces. Rather than making a mark with a drawing implement, I pool the
ink on the paper with Chinese brushes, filling the brush and then releasing it
onto the surface of the paper. Once pooled, I move the ink rather than drawing
it about the paper. The absorption rates varying across the image. Each of the
inks I am using is made from galls sourced from Hampstead Heath, so each
oxidizes to different degrees and at different rates. What I am attempting to
achieve is a sense of space within the shape of the dense image. I am not
interested in these spaces as literal representations as much as I am in
letting them produce a tension between the allusion to the fluid atmospheric
effects of a landscape space, on one hand, and to the mark-making action of
fluid ink on absorbent paper, on the other. A small patch of reserved support
is a brilliant light and a gap in the quasi-rectangular shape, something
outside the pictorial space altogether. So these irregularities are dramatic
pictorial elements and gaps in the image, deep within the pictured space and
bounding the inky shape on the paper's surface.