devastating me to the hulks

alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5671072135015614258" />

I've been doing a series of drawings in response to text from Great Expectations by Dickens and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. They are based on repetitions of selected words and phrases from the books, which are continually written and rewritten to create a drawing. I started the first ones on tracing paper which is a material that I love. As the surface builds up the pencil marks become more and more shiny and glossy. The words that I kept coming back to were mostly from Dickens's G.E. ; marsh mist is so thick and devastating me to the hulks. I was also working with a phrase from Conrad's novella; i lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet - drills- things I abominate, because I don't get on with them..
It's really fascinating to work with a minimal amount of the text in a continuous way. You begin to lose it's context and it is hard to keep track of the correct pattern of words after having written it for the thousandth time. Even thought the text is being obliterated and becoming illegible through the drawing, I still had to hold onto the correct phrase and way of writing it, trying to keep a continuity going.
It becomes mesmeric.