The Act of Irretrievables
Choice is the erasure of possibles.
Carving lino or engraving wood, I find myself endlessly killing what my eyes see. The tool marks a shape; you work around the shape and other shapes appear. Or more correctly, they insert themselves — not having previously been sketched or envisaged — they are born from the movement of the tool. Its water. Many are beautiful. Some are shaped consciously once felt and seen. But most are erased: once seen and never seen again. Fleeting moments. A life in time.
What the eye sees always resides in us. Sediment. A cliff falls; a cloud within us drifts off somewhere and there is what we once saw. Only differently. When I carve letters I begin by cutting the edge of what I have drawn. It is a slow, very concentrated act: eye and hand and tool abandon the world. And then once the letters are marked, the world is recalled: choice calls.
Perhaps it is something I once saw — chisel marks on a monumental stone, lines in a book of lettering — I’m not sure what it is but I find marked out letters beautiful. I rarely start a piece thinking that the marked out letters will remain (they are merely a step towards the bold letter), but when I see them, I invariably want to keep them and then do not. A considered choice, but one which carries with it its grieving.
The piece I am currently working on draws upon a phrase from Genesis: ‘and the evening and the morning were the first [the second / the third / the fourth, etc.] day’. I find it a puzzling phrase: as though night itself were day. In my piece, I have adapted the phrase and run it in a ring around a moon that is sun and a sun that is moon. The phrase reads: ‘and the morning and the evening were the same day’, and because the phrase is carved in a circle, it reads endlessly as though Sisyphus himself were chanting it:
and the morning and the evening were the same day
and the morning and the evening were the same day
and the morning and the evening were the same day
and the morning and the evening were…’
Creation. The feeling I get from letters is the same that I get from shapes. From the sun and the moon rise flames. White on black; black on white. As I carve them, the tool flows into the space between the flames and the eye sees, the hand feels shapes. Many are beautiful and the tools shape, the tools erase and the act is irretrievable.
