Watery Looks
Tracey Warr
Open Studio Catalogue, visiting artist exhibition,
Toronto, Canada 2009
Everything is secretly alive in Tine Bech’s work:
shoes, bridges, streetlights, balloons and coloured
blobs. They hum and react with a playful
anthropomorphic life that is liable to take you by
surprise. Boundless in Space is a pink blob looking a
little like a cushion on wheels that moves and clicks
when you come close to it. Echidna is a black wiry
sculpture, emitting sounds in response to your touch,
which was inspired by the Australian hedgehog of the
same name. Coloured lights are activated as people pass
on the bridge beneath in Tracing Light. A large red
blob accompanies the artist on a bicycle tour of
Toronto Island in another work. And in Mememe, visitors
move around in flamboyant sculptural shoes creating
sound compositions in a gallery space. Bech’s
sculptures and installations are full of bright colours
evoking sunlight and playgrounds. Her drawings, on the
other hand, employ the black, white and sepia end of
the colour range. In the Water trees series, created
for this exhibition at Open Studio, Bech is concerned
with the other end of the weather range too - with the
rain that falls incessantly against your windowpane
some days.
She has created the Water trees drawings by taking an
image of a tree out into the rain. ‘Big fat drops
of rain,’ she says are best, to create
‘watery looks’. The image of the tree is
mirrored by its upside down double, like a tree
reflected in the surface of still water. The alchemies
of printmaking and lithography have allowed Bech to
extend the range of her visual language so that the
process she uses is mimicking her subject. Lithography
relies on the porosity of stone to attract water and on
a film of water repelling printing ink from a greasy
drawing. Between the stone, the grease and the water,
Bech’s images of drowned or floating trees emerge
with their fragile limbs and roots like capillaries.
The self-reflection of these delicate traceries of
branches and roots suggests the water cycle moving
through the circle of life in rain, rivers, sea, trees
and all living organisms. Water keeps going around and
around. Trees contribute to the continuous movement of
water by drawing it up from the ground and then
transpiring it out through their leaves. There is no
beginning or end to the water cycle and no new water.
Only water recycling endlessly through liquid, vaporous
and solid ice states since the beginning of time.
Weather and water are recurring motifs in Bech’s
work. In Rain Balloons, large black balloons float
through the gallery and their movement activates the
sound of rain. In Purple Membrane, swimmers pass slowly
through a purple mist hovering above the surface of a
public swimming pool. ‘Drawing is a way of
thinking,’ Bech writes, and her thinking is
concerned with the body moving through the environment
that it is immersed in. In other drawings she created
her images by jumping on charcoal sandwiched between
paper.
Most of Bech’s drawings look like holes, openings
and non-specific round and oval forms. These echo the
balls and blobs in many of her sculptural works (such
as Tumbleweed, Fnug, Felt Sphere and Everything Round).
Her work draws on a tradition of organic female forms
in the work of women artists including Georgia
O’Keefe, Lygia Clark and Eva Hesse. ‘Life
is probably round,’ wrote Van Gogh (Bachelard,
1969: 232). ’We live in the roundness of life,
like a walnut that becomes round in its shell …
being is round,’ wrote Gaston Bachelard (1969:
234).
Reference
Bachelard, Gaston (1969) The Poetics of Space, Boston:
Beacon Press.
Tracey Warr is a writer and Lecturer in Contemporary
Art Theory at Oxford Brookes University.
http://traceywarr.wordpress.com