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Burn Marks and Incisions
On that day, after we had left our viewing point on the promenade to stroll through the inner city, Austerlitz spoke at length about the marks of pain which, as he said he well knew, trace countless fine lines through history
(W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz, Page 14)
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Burn Marks and Incisions introduces a new body of work. During the last 18 months I resorted to the studio to explore my emotions and reactions to the maddening global events.
For me it was a time of heightened awareness of a grand deceit by politicians, made possible with the help of the mainstream media and generating disastrous results: an unjustified war pushed through under pretense and making the world more explosive, not safer, a government frightening and manipulating its people, all that paralleled by an unbearable presidential election campaign.
Out of the resulting emotional pressure I developed a series of mixed media process paintings on wood and mulberry paper. The burning of marks, the incising of lines into layered wax became a daily exercise/exorcise, a continuous meditation for weeks and months.
While working through my sorrows I concurrently created surfaces, which offer room or various associations: a golden light in a pool of water, or the silvery sheen of a threadbare tapestry. Apparitions form themselves, shift, move and vanish in the existing structures created by the marks in the waxen accumulations. These apparitions are accentuated by the colored pigmentation of the surface and by the hand is movement, marking time.
Christel Dillbohner
Berkeley, November 2, 2004
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