Oil, Water, Blood
(2015)
This was my senior exhibition at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
This show encompassed my early experiments with oil paint marbling which began in fall 2014 and channeled my intense fascination with the way we tell stories and make meaning from the patterns that emerge out of the chaos and suffering in our lives.
After reading Moby-Dick the winter before my show, the imagery of the whale hunt gripped my imagination. I imagined myself from the perspective of a whaler and from that of a hunted whale. I imagined the horror, the fear, the danger, and how it would feel to face one’s death alone surrounded by the ocean.
(Chair isn’t part of the exhibition)The title “Oil, Water, Blood” works on two levels. It references my personal use of oil paint marbling to create imagery of the sea and a bloody whale hunt. On the other level, it’s a synopsis of the New England whale-killing industry where whales (particularly the sperm whale) were killed and butchered to harvest the oil in their heads, their blubber, and their bones. Whale oil was the world’s main source of illumination and fuel before the widespread availability of petroleum.
My marbling setup in the CIA printmaking department
My story with marbling.
Once upon a time…
…in 2014, the fall of my senior year at CIA, I took an amazing bookmaking class taught by Jen Craun.
When learning how to make a hardback book, I really wanted to have marbled paper for my endpages. Back then, there were virtually zero online resources that gave away the secrets of marbling, and so I decided to set up my own crafty experiment.
I filled one of the huge paper-soaking trays in the printmaking department with about two inches of water. Then I added turpenoid thinner to some of my oil paints to make them very runny so they would float on the surface of water. Then, to my excitement, the swirls of colored paint floating on the water’s surface would transfer instantly to the cotton printmaking paper when I put it in the tray!
The damage had been done, so they say. I was hooked on marbling! Soon I was dunking full sheets of paper into the tray. Marbling was a new process for me full of play and discovery. With oil marbling, I had very little control over how the final result looked, so I opened my mind to what the chaotic marbling tray would give me.
I curated nine of these full marbled sheets to be the focal point of the show. I arranged them in a sequence which illustrates the story of a whale hunt, and I paired each with a passage from Moby-Dick (captioned in an etched copper plate).
“Stern all! Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!” Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man’s tormented sleep, as if Starbuck’s voice had caused the long dumb dream to speak.
The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun all over.
The elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.
No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea.
“Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death!”
His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake.
At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
No resolutions could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.
Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like a capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror.
Books and printed materials perpetuate the voices of entities from the past. We hear their echos in novels, poetry, drawings, and photos. We use them to learn about ourselves, who we are, and what we’re capable of.
Aluminum plate lithograph
Aluminum plate lithograph
Aluminum plate lithograph
Aluminum plate lithograph
Aluminum plate lithograph
Aluminum plate lithograph
Bone-white papier-mache sculptures of twisted harpoons and a nearly full-size sperm whale jawbone loom like apparitions in the space and suggest a story of violence and a haunted past.
Twisted harpoons (papier-mache)
Sperm whale jawbone (papier-mache)
