Jeffrey Dell

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Some years ago I was talking to a sculptor friend of mine. I was telling her that I often feel like a sculptor while making prints: it is a physical activity, I am actually manipulating materials that have a slight relief to them, and it is also a process that is indirect, a collaboration between artist and material, artist and process. My sculptor friend thought about this for a moment and finally replied, "No, Jeff, you just think in such a flat way that paper seems thick."

I have had a long-standing desire to make a print or an image into a three-dimensional object. This is, of course, already true, but I've wanted to make that thoroughly more apparent. What would it mean if a drawn mark had a weight and mass of its own? What would it mean if the work of art were subject to the same vicissitudes of aging as our own bodies are? Part of my challenge with these new works has been to try to evoke some of this while still making an object that will remain, if fact, both relatively flat and also just as it looks today.

The work, while patently additive in the successive layering of ink, is very limited: ink is printed through an open silk screen (no "image") with surface manipulation limited to folds in the paper, holes punched in the paper, and fingerprints left in the wet ink (three taboos of printmaking, in fact). Subsequent layers of flat or "open" ink are modified by these superficial manipulations: furrows, canyons, or recesses will not accept the ink; raised or peaked areas will allow the ink to accumulate and build, distorting the form underneath. This results in a surface that could be compared to a geologic process of forming a landscape, of the accumulation of dust and soot on a surface, and the way that accumulation distorts and simplifies the original (now hidden) surface beneath. It is also akin to the changes in skin and flesh as age transforms our faces and bodies, and we move from childhood to adulthood and into middle age.

I believe that the stylistic break from previous work partially explains why the new work is so intuitive in its creation and in how it should be looked at. The change was so great that any quantity of rational thinking would have derailed it. This new work is entirely illogical, and it needs to be, because to make it a logical choice would have shown it to be folly. Only as a leap of faith could I have actually made it.

There are also explicit references to the body, both visually in the work and explicitly in the titles. These pieces are meant to be sensuous, even erotic, without actually depicting the body. They are a celebration of intimacy, of being able to examine and caress another's body that is physically very near, of being welcomed into the small but powerful details of another's sphere of privateness.