Waist Deep in Stillness

Waist Deep in Stillness pictures a figure with a moon for a head, standing waist deep in a sea so still it reads as a single black plane. In its hands, held just above the waterline, is a small paper boat, a fragile vessel offered to a horizon that gives nothing back. There is no wind in this image, no ripple, only the immense quiet of a world that has stopped to watch.

The scene is not painted or printed onto the surface. It is scratched into deep blue coloured mirror glass, drawn out through controlled surface damage rather than added with pigment. Every line of the figure, the boat and the horizon exists because material was taken away, not because anything was laid on top.

Blue carries the weight of the piece. It is the colour of night water, of distance, of a stillness that is not empty but full of held breath, and it settles around the moon headed figure like the sea it stands in.

Because the surface is mirror, the room enters the work. Around and between the scratches, the space you stand in and your own reflection appear, so that looking at Waist Deep in Stillness means standing at the edge of that same black sea, boat in hand, horizon ahead.

From a distance the piece reads as one clear, monumental image, a single figure holding stillness in its palms. Step closer and it opens into a field of controlled scratches, a surface that only resolves back into the figure once you step away again.

The image is always there, with or without direct light. Light does not create it, it sharpens it: under a stronger source the scratches catch and the contrast deepens, while what shifts around the figure is only the reflection, never the image itself.

Waist Deep in Stillness 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 things are not meant to reach the shore. They are meant to be held."

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

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