[Ellen Gallagher: Cutting]
I grew up in New England
and I live now between Rotterdam and New York.
I'm actually a big bird watcher in Rotterdam now
because it's a great migratory space
and I'm there with my binoculars,
and hiking around there.
And I'm looking very precisely
at these fleeting glimpses of birds.
You try to remember what you've seen,
it's gone, and then you try to find it again.
In the bird paintings,
I start with a more precise drawing,
and then from that drawing,
I abstract the form.
And it has to be abstract.
It wouldn't work if it was really like
a completely believable, detailed,
precise rendering of the bird.
I like radically cutting into the painting,
inserting these paper birds,
and then trying to figure out how to believe in it.
I'd have to somehow, then,
weave them back into the paintings.
The things that separates the planes
are the incisions and the edges of the matter.
Each separate layer of cutting or painting
is visible
and readable as an edge.
It is interesting to see
the way content surfaces over time,
both in my mind and in the skin of the work.
["Watery Ecstatic Series" (2001--2009)]
The "Watery Ecstatic" works were more kind of
narrative--literary--relationship to the sea.
The cut drawings were about
bringing that biological surface
into the form of the drawing.
I used to get these air bubbles that annoyed me.
The slice I made when the paper was wet,
just to release air bubbles,
opened up and became this sort of
cut that was fleshy.
And it's funny, then,
as you move into the "Watery Ecstatic" works
to see that cut become so conscious.
For me, I found that to be a surprise.
Cutting a graphic edge from the earlier works
into the newer works
has been, I think, consistent.