A Hush Behind Antennae

A Hush Behind Antennae holds a single, suspended moment. A visitor from elsewhere lifts one hand toward her own mouth, eyes open too wide to blink, antennae raised like instruments still listening. Nothing here is caught mid sentence. It is caught mid silence.

No paint. No print. No ink. The figure is scratched into the surface of deep green coloured mirror glass, appearing through removal rather than addition. The bold contour of her skull, the ridge of her collar, the coarse field of dots gathered along her side, all of it is held by controlled scratches, a field of fine marks that catch the eye exactly where the surface has been taken away, not added to.

Green carries her. It is the colour of something not quite of this world, alert and cool, neither warning nor welcome. Against it, her form holds an otherness that black or grey mirror glass could not give her, a quiet reminder that she is seen through a colour that belongs to no one place.

From across a room she reads as a single graphic gesture, a face, a raised hand, a line of light cut from the dark. Step closer and that clarity gives way to a field of individual marks, each one part of the whole and none of them the whole by itself.

The mirror glass never lets the viewer stand outside the work. The room behind her, and the person looking, settle into the reflective ground around the figure, so that whoever approaches becomes part of the same quiet interior she seems to be watching. Light does not create the image. It sharpens it, the contrast deepening under a direct source while the picture itself never leaves the surface.

Her raised hand reads as a hush more than a greeting, a gesture that asks for stillness rather than announcing arrival. The wide, unblinking eyes suggest a being built for watching rather than speaking, present in the room without ever needing to explain herself. That tension, between an alien held rigid mid gesture and a viewer caught reflected beside her, is the quiet charge of the piece.

A Hush Behind Antennae 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.

"Some visitors announce themselves. Others simply ask you to be quiet, and look."

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

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