Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Silence and Gold

Lindsay Kolk
(New York, NY)

Lindsay Kolk made this pen and paper sketch almost a year ago, and traded it for her copy of Songs About Books.  Since then, her experiments with lines have led to a beautiful show, Seeking Silence, which hung at the International Arts Movement through early October.

Part of her artist's statement on this show is drawn from Rilke: "If you attach yourself to Nature, to the simple and small in her, which hardly anyone sees, but which can so unexpectedly turn into the great and the immeasurable, if you have this love for what is slight and try quite simply, as a servant, to win the confidence of what appears to you poor, then everything will become easier for you, more uniform and somehow more reconciling, not perhaps in the understanding, which holds back in amazement, but in your innermost consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge."

The transformation in her work bears this out: her line drawing on scrap has grown into a whole flock of individual pieces that together form a beautiful and substantial whole, and in another kind of magic the simple pen and paper which originally called her to the project seem to have transmuted, here and there, to gold.