Essential Variations, 2019, (ongoing series) handmade charcoal on Stonehenge paper, each 7X8”,
In the ongoing project Essential Variations, each image is drawn with a unique handmade charcoal stick. The specificity of each charcoal stick, the variations of hues, from brown to blue, the texture, from hard to soft, the quality, from unequal to unusable play an important role in the formation of each drawing, which in turn speaks to the otherwise unseen richness of the material.
The patterns used for each drawing is extracted and mined from a previous drawing (see Speck I and II below), and used as a template for a new representation to arise.
Speck I & II / 2019 / handmade charcoal on paper / 42 X 36”
“Speck II is unearthed from Speck I through a slow mining of the visual information. It is a way to excavate a new representation, to unveil an untold story, a hidden reference. Black dacite is a newborn rock that was spit out of the ground by a volcanic eruption, 100 years ago in Lassen National Park, California, where I documented the resting rocks on the ground. In the black rock, speckled with white feldspar mineral crystal, is written an event: blast and destruction. Carefully extracting each speck through drawing allows for their re-localization in space, as extracts of powerful energies: not unlike stars in the night sky, lights from a topographical view of a city, microscopic beings, or molecular intricacies.” (excerpt from Mining-On The Horizon)