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I cut up dictionaries letter by letter. The cutting mirrors the action of comprehension; the notion of cutting up is a reminder of how we subdivide and categorize in an attempt to understand, to learn, and to control. This activity produces a pile of letters: text dust. It's a beautiful material, one that radiates longing, loss and complexity. This project began as a response to the insufficiency of any canonical resource to provide meaning and purpose in the face of overwhelming grief. Now, my work has matured to suggest the bittersweet process of making sense of any life lived in the infinity of options. A disordered pile of individual letters isn't meaningless. Instead, the fractured words represent the inability to forge or decipher meaning despite the possibility of doing so: they present a yearning, a lacking. My projects often begin with an attraction to a symbolic cultural or organic material: dictionaries, wishbones, human hair, personal journals, rust, or baby teeth. I establish a ritualistic repetitive process in the making of the work which serves as a physical act of remembrance: cutting, wrapping, mending. I utilize the techniques and processes of printmaking and photography to transcribe a source material to increase its scale or multiply its number while still maintaining its precision and fidelity to source. Time makes history and memories, and I'm interested in how the body can record and communicate this passage. The form of a book, a swathe of cloth or a strand of hair can serve as metaphors and reminders for the interplay between nature, nurture, sense and experience present within the body. Visual and conceptual dualities underlie my work: structure and chaos; word and image; public and private; mind and body; memory and experience; the known and unknown. My processes are a dialogue with evocative materials that reconfigure and expand initial meanings to include my own peculiar experiences and perceptions.
birthweight speaks of joy, of pride, of memory, of expectation, of measurement, of burden. This exhibition is built around visual and conceptual dualities: mind and body; nature and nurture; structure and chaos; word and image; known and unknown. The photos and prints in this series, Dwell, do not contain a single narrative but instead are meant to suggest the complex nature of relationships and the processes of growth and maturity. This peculiar little house can epitomize innocence, comfort or vulnerability when juxtaposed with spaces of transition, uncertainty and personal memory. The series Embedded uses direct casts of this same gingerbread house, but alters its symbolic meaning and purpose. This series is about war. Now this house is a transparent shell that contains the language of trauma; these homes are filled with articles about war cut up word by word. These transparent homes reduce the space between the viewer and disaster to almost nothing. My use of text dust, specifically cut up dictionaries, is ongoing. In the piece birthweight the pile of text dust conveys potential, or the experiences of birth and death, of creation and destruction, inherent in any life cycle. Beyond Words displays every illustration from a single dictionary volume, cut out by hand and mounted on wall panels. This piece makes tangible the limits of language. What is beyond words to explain or define?
Most of my artwork is an effort to answer my questions about the processes of time; the possibility for something eternal; and the interplay of transience and permanence. I frame these questions from within my own experiences, more specifically within the confines of my own body, often using the shape, blemishes, scars, colors and patterns of my body as the basis for much of the markmaking within the work. I am curious about genetics and experience; about the roles that nature, nurture, sense and environment all play in shaping identity. In this context knotted twine might suggest connection or tension; possibly the double helix of DNA; or may be merely a reminder of the amount of accumulated stuff one has to tie down and carry around. Selecting dictionary definitions and then cutting them up letter by letter talks about a perpetual search for meaning, the patient digestion of enormous quantities of information in an effort to understand, and the impossibility of stabilizing knowledge. Images of my body covered in writing suggest an effort to communicate across both time and space, with the body as a diary holding onto memory against the inevitability of loss, forgetting and death. As experience, knowledge and memory interact in a variety of ways, I am consistently looking for visual connecting points between our transient existence and something more timeless.
Is there anything eternal, unchanging and timeless? That question fascinates me. I look for answers by exploring the processes of time, the interplay of transience and permanence, and in particular what kind of visual marks time leaves behind as trace evidence of its passing. My work includes diverse media, but I use printmaking, photographic, and casting processes for their ability to capture an image directly and without much intervention. I design situations where experimental marks recording the passage of time are left on paper and printmaking plates without my direction. I sometimes seek out processes where markmaking is beyond my control, where I can be an observer or a participant rather than a director. I often use my own body in my experimental efforts to image the passing of time. My thumbprint is a mark that represents an eternal, unchanging ideal. I set-up experiments in my studio, or in nature, where I interject this unchanging thumbprint into the world based in time - perhaps by incrementally eroding sections of an etching plate - to see what happens when constancy and flux meet. (What does 24-hours look like?) To contrast with the permanence of my thumbprint, I use a pendulum and the shape of my body as symbols of impermanence and time passage. Photographs of pulls in fabric suggest to me single moments, compressed elements separated from the continuous expanse of time. The briefest of moments when the ocean’s undertow pulls at my feet is an example of connecting to something that seems endless. Images of my body covered in writing imply an effort to communicate across both time and space, with the body as a palimpsest holding onto memory against the inevitability of loss, forgetting and death. Time and memory interact in a variety of ways; the series of peapods, Memorial, tries to embody the desire to remember, and the maintenance of specific memories as perfect jewels outside the stream of the present tense. I consistently look for visual connecting points between our transient existence and something more permanent.
At its base my artwork is an inquiry, a series of experiments. I often use my own body in these experiments, for instance in my efforts to image the passing of time. The shape of my body is always changing, and I map its shifting marks of time— my birthmarks, freckles and scars. My thumbprint is my mark of constancy, a suggestion of eternity. Even when I am not investigating my specific self, I try to reference the corporeal body within my work as the site where inquiries occur. My work is an effort to answer my many questions, questions such as: What kind of marks does the passing of time make? Is time continuous or discretely partitioned? How do you experience the ‘now’, the present tense since it never stops changing? Can you learn from investigating yourself—your own body, mind and soul—and if so how do you relate this objectively? So on and so forth. I hope that my art can sustain ambiguity and retain the intrinsic elements of its production (experiment, time, transience, lack of a fixed meaning or final conclusion) while still suggesting answers to these questions. I hope that my markmaking never eclipses the potential input from unexpected sources—with their various options including chaos, structure, impermanence, and eternity. And finally, within my process I hope to not only depict my interests in time and timelessness, but also to enact them.
How do you image the passing of time? Or rather, what image does not show the passing of time, but shows eternity instead? My work engages diverse media as I explore the processes of time, and the interplay of transience and permanence. I search for ways to make marks directly out of my working process, rather than consistently filtered through my mind and hand. Since I treat my artmaking as a venture into the unknown, my studio is as much a laboratory as it is an atelier. I set up the parameters, the pseudo-scientific rules for the art “experiments", and then I operate within the boundaries of this subjective science with empirical exactness (I always follow my own rules). Only by devising these structured systems can I notice what wasn’t predicted, what wasn’t expected. These are the moments I relish. I watch and I wait and I look and I listen, observing and enjoying the marks that time makes, optimistically awaiting the infinite ones.
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| © 2008 Elizabeth Dove. All Rights Reserved. |
On this Day
birthweight
Mother Tongue
Five Years
Passing Time
Elizabeth Dove