Thursday, September 5, 2013

A study on barnacles 


I began drawing barnacles. Barnacles. Those stubborn oceanic organisms that cover rocks on the shore, attach themselves to sharks and plastic bottles floating through the ocean. Barnacles, the crustaceans that compete for space and resist displacement. I think of the relationship between traveling and identity as a positioning, the pull of place, and the construction of the foreign. Barnacles wash up on shore attached to pieces of drifting material. In their mobile stage of life they are looking for potential places to be mapped and named as home. They are not only signifying in themselves but in what they attach to and how.

I am experimenting with the relationship between barnacles, movement and absence, found materials, and the variables of travel. Ulrich Williams comments on the work of On Kawara, "...movement and change are functions of our awareness of time, an awareness shaped by a sequence of events determined either by ourselves or by external circumstances."
                                                 (Excerpt from artist statement).