JEFFREY DELL
Artist Statement: Big Pelt & Tra Due Acque

My newest series, Big Pelt, uses hair as way of alluding to a number of themes. Hair happens. It arrives where we don’t want it; we lose it where we do. Hair is both an expression of how insuppressible life is, while still being a reflection of the slow dissolution of life. It is both life force and entropy, youth and age, vigor and entropy.

Hair on the body of a loved one is cherished; on the body of a stranger it is repulsive, even frightening.

Hair is an insuppressible force. As we age, we find it in places we don’t want it, and we lose it in places we do want it. Hair is simultaneously an expression of age and youth, entropy and vigor. On the body of a loved one, hair is treasured and loved. On the body of a stranger, it is repulsive, even frightening. Hair has the ability to elicit a very wide range of responses in us, even many of these at the same time.

This new work is about aging, feeling ugly and loved at the same time. It’s an attempt to look very closely at something ugly and still laugh. And it’s also an attempt to look at something closely that is very beautiful and not be afraid. I find that in loving another person (while looking at myself) I am required to do this sometimes.

As the hair in these images rises off the paper, it begins to take on a life of its own. But these are “prints:” a print is an index, a mark left by something that is now absent (a finger, a foot, a copper plate, a woodblock, a screen…). We think of a print as being infinitely thin: it is not a thing, but a representation, a shadow, a reflection. Ink is not itself, it is simply there to indicate something else. But, what happens if ink begins to be itself? It is as if the print itself is beginning to sprout hair that was unwanted, unexpected, and difficult to hide.

Also in this exhibit is the book, tra due acque (“between two waters”) as well as some single-leaf prints from the book, which were editioned in small numbers. This book is, in origin, the catalog for my MFA thesis that I made between 1998 and 2000. I have never had the opportunity to exhibit it in Austin until now.

Considering the requirement of creating a catalog for the thesis, I decided that it should be an artist’s book, rather than a traditional catalog. Thinking in this direction, it seemed an interesting idea to hand-draw and create the “reproductions” of the artworks in the thesis, rather than use photographic means. In this way the images in the catalog begin to speak less of what the work actually looked like, and more of how I felt about them, what I hoped for, feared for, and how I considered them as I was now gone, absent from school (I finished this last requirement after leaving). I was then living and working in Venice, Italy, and no longer in arid New Mexico.

Thus the “reproductions” are either woodblocks or mezzotint/drypoint on copper plates. The cover is an old piece of felt used on intaglio presses when printing. This book, and the prints I made in that period, is one of the earliest times that hair entered into my work.