Ember on the Line

Ember on the Line holds a single suspended moment: a comic book heroine caught mid call, telephone receiver pressed to her ear, eyes closed, lips parted, as if the voice on the other end matters more than anything else in the room. She is drawn in the visual language of 1960s romance and war comics, but stripped down to its bones here: thick, even contour lines and coarse Ben Day dots, shaped not in ink but in a field of individual marks worked into deep red coloured mirror glass.

The image exists because material has been taken away, not added. Where the surface has been worked, light gathers and the figure glows in fine white lines; everywhere else, the drawing's original black becomes the undisturbed red of the mirror glass itself, holding her in near total darkness but for the single spotlight beam falling from above.

Red carries its own charge here. It is the colour of urgency, of the heat behind a phone call held a beat too long, of a decision already made before the line has even connected. It turns a private, quiet gesture into something closer to a held breath.

The image is always present, with or without directed light. What changes is never the drawing but the room around it: under a stronger light the scratches catch and the contrast deepens, sharpening what is already there. Light does not create this image. It sharpens it.

Because the surface is coloured mirror glass, not canvas, the space around her keeps shifting. Whoever stands before the work finds themselves drawn faintly into that same red field, standing just behind her shoulder, part of the silence she is listening into. Monumental from a distance, up close the figure resolves into a field of fine scratches that the eye reassembles into a woman holding a phone.

Ember on the Line 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. This work is unique.

"Some calls change nothing. Others change everything before a single word is spoken."

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

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