Statement
It all started with jalis, carved stone screens perforated with intricate geometric patterns that are used in Indian palaces, shrines and funerary structures. At once architectonic object and 2-dimensional image, the jali had fascinated me throughout a 7-month fellowship that took me to India in 1993. That fellowship, which had followed upon many years of studio practice, was transformative in ways that I could not have foreseen. When I finally returned home I wound up closing my studio, began writing and eventually obtained a graduate degree in art history.
Years later, wanting to make art again, I turned to the jali, beginning a series of representational charcoal drawings as a route back to the studio after my hiatus in academia. After capturing the jalis in numerous labor-intensive drawings I began playing with the imagery: altering it; erasing it and imposing additional layers of drawing. This led to creating digital print multiples in various sizes as a vehicle to more efficiently support the drawing, collaging and compositional processes of my current work.
I largely use pastel pencils for these drawings. This medium not only allows me to work finely and precisely but also broadly and gesturally. The jali digital prints – themselves prints of drawings - are the ‘wallpaper’ on which I work. This functions as both substrate and palimpsest. The original patterned drawing on the print is alternately concealed, revealed and sometimes surprisingly emerges as a ghost image through the pastel drawing overlaying it. I use the print’s drawing and design as an occasional (and sometimes returning) guide to what will occur when I draw on top of it.
My work looks to sources as varied as Indian and Persian painting, maps, textiles and diagrams to Eastern Orthodox icons, early European maps, architectural drawing, photographic images and 20th-century abstraction. While some of my drawings depict imagined worlds others derive from specific places and even actual times within those places. Both types of drawing use a loosely eclectic rendition of mapping to structure the imagery. I like to think that in this body of work the artist and art historian have merged.