another studio video
October 5, 2010
Tracing, tracing, tracing, drawing a circle within each tiny hole in a complicated bit of textile, then painting inside each tiny circle later with colour. And then perhaps printing or drawing or painting over the whole thing later, subsequent layers burying and obliterating earlier work. Tedious work. Listening to me lament why did I choose this one? It has so many tiny holes! Peter asked, half in jest, why don’t you just spray paint it? Or put powdered graphite through it?
Oh. Well. Spray paint just won’t DO, it’s just too fast, too immediate. Powdered graphite, or iron oxide powder? I could do that, but it would have to be done by hand, meticulously, every mark a decision unto itself, then the sealing layer would have to be applied by hand too, gradually, capturing every bit of powder with a tiny brush, each little coloured circle counted, measured, touched. I can’t work any other way than this slow, deliberate, laboured mark-making. I’m sure that has something to do with why I so rarely finish anything. But so much of my work is ABOUT work, and about the quiet magnitude of the labour of one pair of hands, slowly building up something big out of a collection of tiny repetitive movements. Like a factory. Like knitting. Like filling up a space with tiny little tick marks, or dots, or circles drawn in holes in lace, filling up time with labour for the sake of labouring.
This is the walnut ink I made. It’s terribly bleedy on this Japanese paper, and better suited to a denser sheet. I’ll do some drawings with it later on Rives BFK, the rag paper I used for my colour test while the ink was boiling. For now, though, I like that this is messy, with the ink spreading outside the pencil lines, dots bleeding together in places, brown stains leaking right through the paper onto other parts of the folded sheet. It’s a first layer anyway, it’ll all get covered up.
Posted by jodi on October 5, 2010 at 10.00pm
