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Hidden in Plain Sight
by Pat BoasReiterations exhibition catalogue (Marylhurst University, 2004)
The translucent sheets draped in a line are covered with a single word. Artifacts of a private, obsessive performance, they present an interplay of sound and sight. There is the sight of the individual letters—the snaking curves of the s, the circular o's, the humps of the r's and the sharp-angled w. There is the sound each letter engenders, barely noticed in the rush toward sense. There is the dense field of fuzzy, black marks, accrued in a slow sequence on the front and the back, evidence of time and monotonous, meditative activity. There is the crisp, rhythmic tapping of the typewriter, not heard but echoing, and the felt sound of the word itself, sorrow, attended by branching associations, different for each viewer, materializing neither as image or sound but as a collection of ghosts. And there are the patterns that emerge unbidden from a set of outwardly insignificant variables to reveal the harmonious, inevitable anatomy of repetition.
Linda Hutchins' typewriter drawings act as windows on infinite reverberations. Yet the words covering the sheer panels of vellum or silk tissue are homespun, domestic, harking back to an earlier involvement with weaving. The collection begins with Untitled (sorrow). Hutchins chose to linger on the word to acknowledge that sorrow—less pointed than grief, more lasting than anguish—is part of ordinary life. In a second piece the saying "You do not miss the water until the well runs dry" trickles in rivulets down multiple panels. Reiteration gathers the mild admonitions parents direct toward children, while Trousseau lists the virtues that are necessary for a successful marriage. Threaded into the repetitions of these words are the rhythms of prayer beads, the breath of mantra, activities meant to open a path between the conscious and unconscious mind.
The patterns were unexpected. They lay hidden in the letter counts of the words, in the spaces between the words, in the shift to the left or right as the lines continue down the panels, and in the way the words crawl around the backs, reversing themselves, contesting the two dimensionality of the surfaces. Most of all, they lay hidden in the mistakes. Dropping a letter is like dropping a stitch; it curiously creates a more complex pattern because, given a large enough field, the gestalt inevitably repeats. By regulating the speed of her typing—the faster she types the greater the likelihood of mistakes—Hutchins is able to influence the patterns as they unfold. But at the same time there is an element of letting them become what they become, creating a choreography between chance and purpose.
Natural scientists learn about the rules governing a system by disturbing the system to see how it reacts. In the same way, perhaps, the mistakes of the weaver may reveal something about the way the weaver weaves. In some traditions, errors are emphasized rather than concealed, and the ability to effortlessly integrate the aberrant element, thereby forming a new pattern, is an indication of the weaver's skill. Over time, countless weavers, knitters, and lace-makers have patiently worked out an inexhaustible set of variations to add to their respective crafts. Each illuminates, as does Hutchins, the structure behind appearance. They bring geometry into the realm of the hand, and their hands, in turn, have taken geometry into the territory of ritual, knitting fragments into history.
Repeat any word over and over and it loses some of its particularized power. But is meaning ever laid aside? The drawings of Reiterations work as incantations, recalling the generations of women who reproduced the words of others, who created useful things of intricate beauty, who labored for their loved ones. Through the delicacy of their patterns they work the meanings of words into our subconscious, a percussive beat that ties together body and mind.
Pat Boas
November 2003
Pat Boas is an artist based in Portland, Oregon.