A Spine Arched in Embers

In this work a figure lifts both arms overhead and lets her spine arch back, a gesture of release more than defiance, held in a language borrowed from the comic panel: bold contour, a coarse field of dots, a body reduced to pattern and light.

Nothing here is printed or painted onto the surface. Every contour and every dot across her shoulders and skin is a controlled scratch cut into the coloured mirror glass, the image arriving through removal, not addition. Seen up close she dissolves into a field of individual marks, a field of fine scratches; step back and she reassembles into a single monumental gesture.

The mirror glass is red, and the red is not decoration. It carries the heat of the title, the ember glow beneath a body caught mid stretch, the flush of exertion and of something more intimate, the colour of a pulse rather than a costume.

Because this figure is scratched into a mirror rather than printed on canvas, the room around her never stays still. The gallery wall, the passing visitor, your own reflection slide into the gaps between the scratches, so that looking at the work means, for a moment, becoming part of it.

Light does not create this image. It sharpens it. The figure is present whether the room is bright or dim, and under a direct light the scratches catch and the contrast deepens, though the pose and the pattern never depend on where you stand to exist.

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.

"She does not perform for the mirror. She becomes it."

More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.

Questions about this work, availability or shipping can be sent through the contact page.