_The unsaid

What can not be communicated through words.

I seem to have many of them

Yet they can never express It._

I made blue as a marker of the feeling of the incapacity to get a message across to someone. When you speak, time and time again, but words lack meaning, do not land in the other person's ear. I chose that specific shade of blue to smear on the card because I find it an ambiguous colour. To paraphrase Hannah Gadsby’s "Nanette" or Maggie Nelson’s "Bluets", blue is paradoxical. It is polysemic: simultaneously warm and cold, deep and evident. It eats away at the image with its vibrance. The brush strokes, uneven, add an impression of roughness up close while feeling soft from afar, as if the paint never entirely dried. The colour reveals the marks left over time on the back of the faded photograph.

May 2022
Watercolour on photograph, embroidery and collaged plant.