Mara Goldberg Chinese Grid Series

"Chinese Grid Series" is a body of 16 works deriving from my previous works, such as "Handle Drawings", "Unbound" or other works that I processed from what I call 'stem-image' or 'block-image' in a derivational logic. A 'first' image within a series generates the next image through displacement and shifts–here dots and lines. The first image that I call 'Stem-image' is my source for processing. These works relate to the idea of plasticity. The drawing – or in other words 'standpoint' – is a cut through trans-formative derivative moves. One could also say that a drawing is an extract within a trajectory or a transient process. Not in the sense of some fragment belonging to a lost wholeness or lost part, but as an edge or puncture made visible through structure, repetition, sequence, differentiation. The 'extracted drawing' is the sum of overlapping shifts, at a certain point, designated as form. In that regard all my drawings are a cut within an ongoing motion. A plain and arbitrary cut which could have been made before, or after within the flux – indifferently.

Therefore a work must comprise at least two paired drawings. The 'paired' (or more) drawings follows a determined mode of transformation, with the logic of 'moving void'. Move void means to draw void, in its negative. And to 'move' void therefore means moving the edge which makes void appear. Moving ‘non-matter’. Moving the space between dots and lines. Moving the space around dots and lines.

This is a never ending process, of which the work is the visible span.

Concretely, I used a Chinese writing grid which I enlarged and printed in silkscreen. This grid is an 'underlay structure', a mental and material area to work out standpoints, directions and space. One could name it a place. This 'underlay structure' is stable, it frames and reveals what moves.

The orange dots and lines – my tools or vocabulary – are painted on the grid in distinct layers or platforms: a layer of small dots, a layer of larger dots, a layer of lines. The layers overlap. Spacing between dots overlap. The layers are not bound. Therefore shifts and moves can be partially covered, or even entirely absorbed.

The derivational displacements of the dots and lines on the grid are determined by a construct like a musical score, I call it a Path. I can repeat it a continuo or interrupt it. As an example, the interval between dots can be crescent, or decrescent. Each 'drawing' has its specific path, generated by the previous drawing's path, repeating and trans-lating it either identically or changing pace and spacing.

Examples of modes that determine paths are translation moves, doubling, tripling, associates/dissociates, gyratory, permutation, 'move void', stable/unstable, spinning, spinning of the spinning.

Basically, the path itself, or differentiation itself, is irrelevant. There is nothing beyond dots or lines, nothing more than signal, cut and assertion of form. Form is production itself, with its own logic written out.

Mara Goldberg, 2015