silent parrot press: the mappish......

fable in brief...(detail) etching ,coloured pencils and bees wax

Maps play a significant role within the surface fabric of fable in brief...limited to almost incidental mud maps sketched in graphite and watercolour they are so fragmented that one could never really find any familiar point of reference...they remain simply 'mappish'...and like almost every piece in the show they have been immersed in bees wax...a medium I have used for a number of years and find difficult to let go of...apart from its subtle yet potent metaphoric resonances it is the contradiction of the muted transparency it affords the surface of paper that continues to provide possibilities...I am aware that this subtle transformation of the surface of the image provides a veil of distance between the image and the viewer...available but still something remains slightly inaccessible.

In keeping with the notion of 'collisions' of disparate images the experience of viewing the now almost obsolete illustrated encyclopedia in its codex format is also an underlying thread to experiencing

fable in brief...the large twelve and twenty four volume sets of Encyclopedia Britannica that were a part of almost every house hold throughout my childhood and part of my adult years the pages of such books provided a sense of expectation and discovery each time one flicked through any chosen volume...although no encounter was ever the same regardless of how familiar one was with their contents...the juxtaposition of text and image immediately fragmented by the indexed notations of illustrations in alphabetic text or Roman numerals. There remains an essential element embedded in my making that is anchored in nostalgia,,,but it is a form of nostalgia that is continuously seen as a mappish form in the shape of a wound or scar...of something from the past having healed but still visible...at times hauntingly capable and worthy of remembrance.