About Art on Mirror

Art on Mirror is a body of work in which the image is scratched into coloured mirror glass, and the world in front of the work becomes part of it. Every line is cut into a deep mirrored surface of acrylic glass in green, red or blue. The scratches are always there, bright against the colour, while the surface around them keeps reflecting the room, the daylight and the person looking.

From a distance the image reads clear and complete, a pale figure held in a field of colour. Step closer and the work opens into a delicate web of individual marks, fine and deliberate, each one essential to the whole. Behind and between them the mirror does what a mirror does. It carries the room and the viewer into the composition, so the surroundings in the work change with the place where it hangs, while the image itself stays firmly in place.

Light does not create the image. It sharpens it. The coloured ground absorbs and reflects, the scratched lines catch and hold, and under a focused spotlight the contrast deepens until the figure takes on a sculptural, almost luminous quality. In softer light the colour comes forward and the work settles into a quieter register, without ever losing its subject.

Three colours, one language. Green is the colour of growth, of forests and of things that keep returning. Red is the colour of blood, of fire and of everything we cannot stay calm about. Blue is the colour of night, of deep water and of quiet distance. Each colour is the emotional ground its works are set against, and the subjects are chosen to belong to it.

Art on Mirror continues the scratched imagery of Art with Scratch on a new ground. Where the black works draw their power from absence, these draw it from reflection. The viewer is no longer only looking at the work. The viewer is in it.