Much of my practice is in printmaking, though I use digital media, drawing and painting to help me understand and interact with what I see. Drawing moves me beyond recording superficial detail of an object to an awareness of qualities integral to its presence. For example, I have had to spend many hours in hospital waiting rooms, and began making drawings of chrome fixtures, corridors and mechanical objects so that I could explore the effect of shiny metal, seeming cleanliness, sparse surfaces and perspective. I could have taken photographs, but this would not have made me notice or understand as much as drawing scenes in hospitals. Diary-like drawing is not part of my practice that carries an emotional charge, or something I want to use in a piece of work immediately, but these projects are a resource and some day they will emerge. Drawing is an inquiry process, and functions like a diary. Other inquiries have been drawing lunar moths, sunflower spirals, patterns in the skin of puffballs, water droplets, amoebas, dancers in motion, islamic patterns, creating digital images on textured polymer surfaces, and pigs. These are not intended to communicate anything to anyone. They are helping me to understand the three-D form of things. By seeing something and interacting with it, I understand it better.

Intaglio printmaking can be a slow, messy process, and it has often occurred to me that I could use a computer to produce similar images much more easily. I prefer to create printed images from hand drawings or direct engraving because digital programs cannot provide the same richness or tone. Filters in Photoshop can mimic the look of a drawing medium, but they have repeat patterns in their pixel arrangements that, even if they are almost imperceptible, may make an image look contrived. My images are therefore bound by the possibilities of software that I did not design, rather than the limits of my practice. Working to establish a printed image by hand is a struggle, a series of decisions that reflect sustained involvement and alteration. A computer image shows no artifacts left from its creative process. It is flawless, and conveys no sense of labor or emotional involvement in its production in the way a non-digital print does. Signs of a production process, of human rather than algorhythmic design are a better means of communication, I feel. Though a press could be thought of as proscribing the means of production, the marks produced are far more random than digital ones. An image can be highly detailed and delicate, only producible a few times before it becomes less readable. 

In the print shown here, the figures in it represent us. Presences each on our own path, reaching into others’ lives, but not actually able to physically join or fuse with others. The figures dwell together in the image, and illustrate the solitariness of lives, as well as our efforts to reach one another. They are separate, trying to communicate with and support each other. The poses the figures have are a little theatrical, more alive than with just ordinary gestures, they are also un-clothed. Less obvious motions of hands and bodies may not be clear enough to convey the sense of reaching out for others. Have they awareness of their own deaths, are they enervated because of this? Yes. I assume that all people reach for one another, even terrorists so full of desperation that they act without compunction to kill people in my world, or their own.

The theme of interconnectedness of people and history, whether a good connection, or a terrifying one is something I return to repeatedly.

How does this work pull at the fabric of eventualities? Looking at it invites viewers to examine the separateness of each of our lives, yet realize that though we are distanced, we are close, united in perceiving our own death in the Heidegger sense. We are more than a resource (for blowing up, or for employment) more than people who have learned how to work and keep our human component hidden. We share the experience of knowing we are apart, of otherness, yet we are together in the situation of dwelling and being in life. In the four-fold sense, the figures are mortal, the life paths are the gods, manipulated and evolved. The earth (dwelling) contains the figures in the print. It has given rise to the questing that we do in a temporal, spatial, spiritual and physical matrix. The sky links them to the passage of time, and the urgency to keep alive and participating in life. 

I find the idea of string theory to be a useful basis for thinking about Heidegger. As I understand it, it is a scientific explanation of how the universe that is manifesting right now (that is, while you are reading THIS), that what we encounter, is actually all we could possibly experience at a given instant. Things have a past and a future affected by every other thing that exists, or ever did exist, or will exist. We experience our world structure because of the interactions of all the objects in it; all their pasts and futures and nows are on trajectories that tangle like strings. We can only know (experience) the energy manifested in things that are able to surface, or become apparent to us, appearing out of the tangle. Physical objects are like knots; we can unravel and manipulate them, re-tie or re-attach them. We see one thing or event, but it occupies the same space as another thing. What happened to the thing we cannot see? There may be other eventualities that we cannot know because our physical presence in this plane twists us past them. This a way of looking at things that discounts  whether we cause changes to happen, or that things get assimilated into different roles because of the priorities of evolution or habits of use. The stings in string theory are a mathematical analogy for thinking of all things’ history being interwoven. It seems to deny the spiritual interactions that I seek to represent.