A Turret Sleeps in Undergrowth

A small toy tank, the kind that once sat on a child's shelf or was pushed across a bedroom floor, turret raised as if still on watch. In this new work it rests differently, drawn not with paint but by taking material away, so that its whole flank sleeps under a coat of green.

The hull, the tracks, the long raised barrel keep only what the light needs to describe them. Thick contour lines hold the shape together, and coarse fields of fine marks stand in for the sheen a real tank would throw off, gathered only on the side that would catch a low sun. Everything else, the underside of the turret, the shadowed flank, is left as pure black, a silhouette the eye completes from memory rather than from information given.

The colour is not decoration. Green is the colour of the undergrowth this small machine was built to disappear into, the colour of camouflage and of things left outside long enough to be reclaimed by grass. Scratched into deep green coloured mirror glass, the toy tank seems to have come to rest exactly where it was always headed, half sunk into a field of fine, loose marks that read as grass at its tracks.

Around it the room keeps intruding. Walls, spotlights, a low plinth, whoever is standing in front of the work, all move across the green surface between the scratches, so the gallery becomes the field the tank is sleeping in. The viewer is not looking at the piece from outside it; standing there, at that moment, is part of the picture.

The image is always present in the surface, with or without direct light. What changes is only the depth of the reflection around it: under a stronger light the contrast deepens and the marks catch and hold more brightly, but the tank does not appear or vanish, and it does not depend on the viewer's angle to exist. Light does not create the image. It sharpens it.

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.

"Even a machine can sleep, once the grass has grown back over 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.