glad fryer

The indexical rubbings and non-representational drawings I have made shift focus from the primary enquiry of my practice, that of images and their power in constituting our representational selves.

The direct analogous relation between material object – door or painted surface – and resulting image, short-circuits much meaning generation, or their capacity for image associations that is the function of the formal imagination . They are mute. They do not sing their narrative – or recount the epic saga of their genealogy – they speak of permanence without heroics.

The mark of the door emerges from out of the background – from the paper, it is not a sign printed on it. The mark emerges from areas of applied pressure, as the surface of the graphite stick passes over differing degrees of resistance offered by the material object. The genesis of the image is blind and nothing to do with visibility – it has everything to do with touch and the contact of bodies.

“In the heart of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; in the night of matter black flowers blossom.” Buried within matter are the germs of form. From the marks emergent of pressures and materials, obscure birds are fledged, black stars shine in graphite skies and fossilized wood grains are excavated reveling the fallen trees from forgotten domestic forests.

The non-representational drawings take material together with the inherent structure of the body in movement and determine form. The germs of form, arising from material and body, are incubated in a short clustering of marks. These drawings begin to sign the body. The marks are at once index and sign.

The representational drawings follow the concerns arising out of the painting. They are part of the reflective process – a thinking through the implications of a painting – they are an after thought. In the same way that the rubbings reflect on material, the representational drawings reflect on form.

Bachelard, G. On Poetic Imagination And Reverie, (1998) Spring Publications, Inc. (third edition), Connecticut. Bullock M. and Jennings M. W. (Ed.) Walter Benjamin “Painting or Signs and Marks” in Selected Writings Vol 1: 1913-1926. (1996) Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass.