“Who knows what that which is coming will really be like and what image is being formed in a world that, for the first time, has consciousness of being an unstable equilibrium floating in the middle of infinity, an accident among the innumerable possibilities of energy.” Octavio Paz
Ironically, collage might be the most liberating creative medium. Despite being a process of gathering image material already wrapped up in everyday life, previously spent, so to speak, in its contribution to former intentions of which the collage-maker played no part (e.g. popular press, literature), it nevertheless inspires an intuitive, extemporary practice. Therein lies its potency in reconfiguring fragments of an existing world - already underway, already connected to fields of meaning that animate our shared human lifeworld - into new gestures, innovations drawn out of familiar terrain. In upcycling the residuum of everyday life, each collage aims to reinvigorate our engagement with mundane existence by means of metaphoric shift, analogical projection, seeing something as something it is not, recognizing similarity in difference, jogging us out of a preconceived understanding of the way things are, towards a vision of how things could be.
In a similar way, the monotypes are born from a collaborative engagement of participating elements. The fluidity of ink across the surface of the plate, the repetitive motion of the brayer,
the fitful gestures of fingers, brushes and scribing tools together offer open-ended play delimited, nevertheless, spatially by the edges of the plate, and temporally by the drying speed of the ink, eventually pushed towards fixity by the very different bodily effort of pressing down. The monotypes in the show are hand-burnished from a mylar plate, and so have not passed through a mechanical press. My aim is to employ the tips of my fingers and the pressure of my body as agents of my vital presence, exploring the restricted frame of the print to conjure the existential predicament of the human condition; micro-gestures towards its abyssal beauty registered, indelibly, in the fibers of paper.
