BEATRIX RAVEN
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Gifts
This piece is part of a series of drawings on vintage ledger paper. I enjoy working with found papers, juxtaposing often-unobserved creatures and natural objects with used ledger pages and text transcribed from found grocery lists or other notes. These outdated documents form marks to which we are immediately drawn, and offer up enigmatic text and unsolvable puzzles.
I want to provoke questions in the viewer: Do old documents really matter within the larger context of our world? Do they retain their meaning once the people who created them are gone? Gifts offers the viewer a chance to think about what we give to our world, and what we take away.
When removed from its context, a mundane personal note scrawled on crumpled paper becomes an inscrutable puzzle. Just One Piece incorporates text from a note found on the street while walking in my neighborhood.
The drawing is also informed by my fascination with paper itself, and the manner in which its condition transmits information. I often include fake coffee stains, scribblings, things crossed out, erasures. Paper is not simply a support system so that these drawings have a place to exist; the paper is also the subject, with its own history and stories to tell.