A Reach Across the Tide
A Reach Across the Tide
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Two figures move through dark water toward each other. Their bodies stay black, closed, unreadable, while the sea around them is a field of fine scratches catching the light. Between them, an arm reaches out from each side, fingertips almost touching, held apart by the last inch of distance the water has not yet let them close.
This work is scratched into deep blue coloured mirror glass. No paint, no print, no ink. The figures exist only because the water around them was taken away mark by mark, a field of individual marks removed from the surface until two shapes stood still inside all that movement.
Blue carries the weight of the piece, the colour of night water, of distance, of the space a body has to cross to reach another body. It is the colour of longing held just before it resolves into touch.
The image is always present, in any light. It does not appear or vanish with the room. Light does not create it, light sharpens it, so under a direct source the scratched water deepens in contrast and starts to move the way real water does, while the two silhouettes stay exactly as still and as close as they were.
Because the surface is mirrored, the room and the viewer are pulled into the water too. Stand in front of it and your own reflection settles among the scratches, between the two reaching hands, so the gap the figures are trying to close is, for a moment, filled by whoever is standing there watching.
From across a room the piece reads as one dark, starlit night and two figures caught mid gesture. Close up, that same night dissolves into a field of fine scratches, each one part of a sea that only becomes water again from a distance.
This work continues the Art on Mirror series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which scratched imagery is set into coloured mirror glass and the viewer becomes part of the work. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure, and where the mirror turns looking into taking part.
"The distance between two hands is where the whole sea lives."
More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.
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