Ring around a rosie...
Artifacts
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Ashes, ashes, we all fall down
Evening Dress
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Sentinels (sold)
Island (sold)
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Works range from 6x4x1 inches to 7x5x1 inches. Ink, paint, and found metal fragments on fabric-wrapped plexiglass boxes.
All works from late spring 2020. |
During the last five months of the COVID epidemic I’ve tried to ground myself by turning to various projects that I have been putting off or avoiding—often for years. Sometimes these efforts bring satisfying results and other times the projects just stare back at me as if to say, “Are you kidding? Do you really think you can focus at this time?”
The works on this page were created for a virtual solo show at Off Main Gallery in Wellfleet, Massachusetts during summer 2020. I approached the task cautiously, going toward the familiar and small. Seaweed, a key subject of my work for the last twelve years, seemed right. I’ve never tired of its variety and beauty. My previous works with seaweed (or algae) have been large, some over eight feet in the longest dimension. They evolved from small specimens placed on a flatbed scanner, enlarged and printed in high resolution. I decided to go in the opposite direction for this show and make tiny pieces: works that did not use a camera or scanner but consist of the aquatic plants themselves. I walked the beaches, gathered specimens, refloated them in dishpans when I got home and coaxed them onto paper. The best results are obtained with delicate species that are one cell thick and ones with branches almost as thin as hairs. The process involved chance and patience.
I decided to call this show “Small Stuff” for several reasons. The obvious one is that the works are small: many about 5x4 inches, and none have a dimension greater than 10. The process of making the work distracted me from the epidemic’s constrictions— for me, small headaches, really, compared to the grim health and economic issues affecting many others. As I collected the seaweed I loved looking out at the water and the sky: no TV or radio news in the background and fresh air to breathe in safely.
Alongside the seaweed, are six mixed-media pieces, more “small stuff”. These incorporate bits of found materials such as chips of rusted metal which I gathered from the land rather than the sea. Although different in character from the seaweed pieces, they, too, speak to me of vulnerability and fragility.
---T Gips, July 2020
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Algae #5
