Black is an Anxious Light
Julie Woodward
Here, There, Then, Now.
(2009)
Ink on Fabriano 150 x 810 cm.
Physical landscape is continuous and unending, open and asymmetric, a smooth space which Giles Deleuze refers to as directional within the intensity of a nomadic wandering journey. The locations of these encounters are chosen from the liminal edges of mudflat and coastline. Within an immersive exploration of place, time and direction are fluid, self is lost. Landscape-as-place is a relational, shifting translation between a landscape and an internal space (carried within the artist and perhaps the viewer) that might release or provoke feelings of awe or anxiety.
The metaphoric landscape-as-place is mediated on the pictorial plane by a process of drawing that echoes territory explored. Hands and feet navigate the temporal instability of rocks, sand and mud, just as hand and brush linger over the paper. Translations and mediations between the digital processes of photography and post-production are reiterated in the mechanical aspects of my drawing process but are relieved by variations of scale and detail, the hand drawn quality of black ink on paper, the methodology of rhizomatic drawing and fugitive shadows and voids.
I slip in between these liminal places, immersed between edges, darkness and light. Black trades in shadows of indeterminate formlessness, a palpable anxiety that inverts that episode of terror and release of the classic sublime and enacts an inverse sublime through endless mire bound only by the edges of the paper. Black illuminates form, pulling and pushing shape and shadow from the white paper.
