Gold Foiling

These patterns have been sitting on my computer for a while. Originally I was thinking of printing ‘Furoshiki’ (a traditional Japanese wrapping cloth for food, clothes or gifts) which is still on my agenda, but since I tend to follow my intuition rather than a scheduled path, this series of limited edition prints with hand applied gold foil detail got to benefit of it.

Dualism is one of my keen interests and appears in many of my works. Dualism presents itself in absolutely everything that is an expression of beauty. As there is no light if not for its counter part, darkness, nothing that is out of balance either in an excess of a positive or negative charge can express true beauty. I love both post-modernism and the Japanese aesthetic ‘Wabi-Sabi’ (the beauty in the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete) which are in many ways exact counterparts. Modernism is absolute, precise, attempting to control nature in a logical fashion, embracing technology. It’s aim is to portray permanence whereas the Wabi-Sabi aesthetic embraces the beauty in the transient nature of all existence. As in many of my other pieces, I’m exploring this theme. The clearly defined shapes appear of solid permanence, but simultaneously contain fluid movement. The fragility and imperfection of the hand-applied gold foil, represents the short lived but glorious beauty of impermanence. The expression of effortless eternal flow passing through elements of precious impermanence comes full circle in only one piece that turns back into itself in a perfect, ageless circuit. All other pieces express the disjointed idea of earthly existence being understood as separate from the infinite flow of life.