A Plum Held in Blue

A single plum rests at the center of a deep blue void, its form held together by a field of individual marks rather than by paint or print. The skin, the pale bloom along its curve, the thin stem, the one bright leaf, all of it is built from controlled surface damage, worked into the coloured mirror glass until what was removed becomes the image.

Nothing here is added. The plum exists because the surface around it has been taken away, scratch by scratch, until a fruit emerges from the dark the way memory holds a single ordinary thing and makes it monumental. Seen from across a room the plum reads whole, a quiet shape caught in one beam of light. Up close it dissolves into the marks themselves, a field of fine scratches with no single line carrying the image alone.

Blue is the colour of the glass this work is scratched into, and here it becomes the colour of stillness, of something ripe held just before it turns. A plum is fleeting by nature, soft, perishable, gone within days. Set into blue, it is given a kind of permanence it was never meant to have, suspended rather than preserved.

The surface is mirror glass, so the room you stand in and your own reflection move across it, between the marks and around the fruit. You are never simply looking at the plum. You become part of the space it floats in, caught in the same blue that holds the fruit still.

The image does not depend on direct light to exist. It is there in low light and in bright light alike. What changes is only the depth, the contrast, the way the scratches catch and let go. 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. This work is unique.

"A plum, held in blue, before it was ever allowed to fall."

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

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