(A) BEING

It began in a first monotype: a shape emerging from black, somewhere between merged faces and a brain scan. Where it came from is unclear. It kept coming back.

Instead of being fixed into one image, the figure was treated as an it, an organism. Print by print it was dissected like a body under examination, with plates, paper and ink instead of a knife. Monotype for the moments it emerges or dissolves. Collagraph and photopolymer for its tissue, built from microscopic images of human tissue. Carborundum for the dark it lives in. Zooming in far enough, the last cells turned out to be the first figures again, living together. The organism had become an ecosystem.

A print is flat and still. To give the figure a life, the prints were put in order and given a lifespan: a video, projected in a loop onto semi-transparent paper. It is not a final image, but a fragment of a life, like a holiday photo of a child. It shows who it was that summer, not who it will become.

No single print can conclude this work, because the figure does not die. The moment it is finished, it fails.

Monotype, collagraph, photopolymer, carborundum and video projection on paper, 2023–2024