Ellen Gallagher: Cutting | "Exclusive" | Art21

[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.