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have become
increasingly fascinated with the Ukiyo-e school of Japanese printmaking.
(Ukiyo-e literally translates to “Floating World” in Japanese a
fleeting and floating world).
It exhibits a desire to capture and enjoy a moment in the ever-changing
reality of our world.
It is the quality of the line and mark making that intrigues me the most
about the images I am drawn to.
The fluid, and repetitive fractal line,
which builds upon itself to create the image, was something I began
experimenting with in drawings.
Unfortunately, it was not translating into my familiar technique of
painting.
One
late night as I was contemplating my frustration, my eyes came to rest
on a mirror with an engraved image of a boat floating on a sea of blue
glass.
These were the lines I was looking for.
They carried the same textural definition, and I could see that these
could be used to translate my drawings into glass.
Experimenting with various diamond wheels, I began cutting and carving
the glass, similar to the way a printmaker carves his design in the
wood.
In
this particular body of work, I am concentrating on the concept of
memory of place.
I am interested in how the information carried away from a place is
skewed
by the viewer’s perception and by time.
Specifically choosing Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace; a place that I
have been on several occasions,
I wanted to explore the accuracy of my memories.
I
have employed a different technique of remembering in each panel.
A drawing done months after a visit, shows that my mind has replaced the
elaborate balustrade with a much simpler version,
details coming from some stock of images in my mind?
Another source comes from the memory of someone else’s photograph,
someone else’s point of view, someone I have never met.
One panel is traced directly from a photo, but quickly becomes a
starting point from which I deviate.
As I carve into the glass each one becomes a patchwork of memories,
an imagined landscape.
Each
image features a girl; face turned away from the viewer, obscuring her
identity.
I have also treated the surface of the glass with silver “mirroring
solutions” to add a small reflection.
In both these ways, I invite the viewer to see themselves in the image,
to imagine themselves in this environment,
and create a memory of this place of their own.
Alison Ruzsa, Fall 2009
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