Chloe S. Watson
Region: South
My reading of Gaston Bachelard’s “The Poetics of Space” has had a profound effect on how I relate my own personal space to memories and experiences. Substituting furniture, doorways, windows, or other domestic architectural elements with these geometric forms separates the viewer from the memories of my past spaces that the original objects lived in. To further enhance the ambiguity of the space, I have been exploring “the blank,” an abstract form that may be read as a negative space, a solid object, or even a thought bubble. My drawing of wood grain is a continuation of a series of drawings that prefaced this work and relies on a connection between the rendered wooden texture, the paper mounted on the panel, and the wooden panel. I’ve also been using wood grain-printed contact paper in my recent paintings. I’m interested in how this utilitarian material and depiction of wood relates to the actual wooden surface as well as my rendering of wood grain patterns.