'Cutting' is on my mind as I prepare for the 'Cuttings' exhibition. In an earlier post, I wrote that I have been letterpress printing at Iota Press--printing the matrix for a book that I am calling "Cuts Make You". As a way to brainstorm for it, I have been printing synonyms for 'cut'. The list is getting longer; here is a selection: clip, incise, sever, saw, select, dissect, section, fragment, bisect, survey, amputate, behead, miter, dice, chop, hurt, edit, wound, part, blinks, focus, prune slice, die, edged, snippet, excise, shun, snip, trim, crop, divide, piece, mutilate, lop, mince, frame, cleft, segment, slit, split, blaze, truncate, curtail, rift, curt, decapitate, shear, partition, trim. Post if you should come up with more words!
Iceland Travels:
Back to Iceland, a land of elemental forces in shape of volcanoes, geysers, glaciers, rivers, waterfalls, ice and wind. It's a land that is continually making and unmaking itself.
Rebecca Solnit in her latest book, The Faraway Nearby, wrote that "These are the forces that will flourish no matter what goes extinct, where the poisons migrate, and how the weather changes. The sun will rise, the winds will blow, the waves will lick the shore, the earth will tilt on its axis so that there is more light in summer, less in winter, rains and snows will fall, if not as they used to, and the waters will turn to solid ice and melt again. This is the world that existed before life and will exist after us."
Back to the studio:
As I explore 'cutting' as process and form, I am interested in how I might apply this process to a material and arrive at a form that refers back to its making. This is a focus at the moment and I was inspired by the basalt formations in Iceland. More to come.....