“Cloth (Black Velvet)”, “Cloth (Red Velvet)” in Photographic Abstractions

Travelling through Europe, retracing Western art, I became fascinated with the depiction of cloth in paintings by early Renaissance masters such as Jan Van Eyck, Robert Campin, Rogier Van Der Weyden, Dierick Bouts and Hugo Van der Goes. In her book Seeing through Clothes, Anne Hollander writes The history of art is full of representations or indications of cloth in use . . . cloth itself, like metal or stone [is] an essential material on which the artistic imagination may work . . . art has always dwelt on the fascinating capacity of cloth to bunch, stretch, hang, or flutter, to be smooth or unsmooth under different circumstances, to be wrought upon and then restored, and wrought upon differently another time. Several photographic series exploring the symbolic potential of cloth were developed from my investigation of early Renaissance drapery. Devoid of elaborate arrangements of baroque folds and ornate pattering, Cloth is the most visually reductive of these series. Cloth represents the essence of an idea, a distillation of fabric as a metaphor for aging and mortality.