Liberty in the Green

She rises from the dark in profile, torch arm lifted, crown catching what little light there is. Nothing here is added. The image exists only because the surface has been taken away, a field of individual marks left to carry her shape out of deep green coloured mirror glass.

From across the room she is monumental, a single gesture of defiance and hope held against the void. Step closer and the figure dissolves into a field of fine scratches, each one placed, none of them announcing itself alone.

Green is not incidental here. It is the colour time gives to copper left outdoors for more than a century, the colour of a promise that has weathered and still stands. The glass carries that patina as its own skin, so the symbol and the material finally agree.

The mirror does not step aside for the image. Around her raised arm and through the dark folds of her robe, the room keeps showing itself, the walls, the other works, whoever is standing in front of her. She was built to hold a crowd in her gaze, and this surface quietly insists that the viewer is part of what is being looked at.

Light does not create this image. It sharpens it. Under a direct source the scratches catch and the contrast deepens, the torch and crown pulling forward out of the green, but she is there in dim rooms too, never waiting to be switched on.

Liberty in the Green 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 promises need to weather before you can trust them."

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

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