Bethesda Terrace Engravings
 

I 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
 

The order of the Bethesda Terrace is as follows, left to right.

 1.Girl (with head and shoulders only showing ) going up the stairs .

 2. the one you can see the fountain

 3. top of the plaza with girl walking from right to left

 4. girl going up the stairs viewed from under the arch

 5. girl  at top of bridge as seen from below