FISH-RING
2016
participatory installation
two wooden plates, paper, graphite pencils, pencil sharpener, string
Gallery Emil, Tampere, Finland
Fish-Ring addresses the themes of absence, search for meaning, reason, and closure. It gives the viewer the possibility to be also a maker, and to concentrate on being present by an act of copying: every viewer can place a sheet of paper over the wooden plate, and rub with graphite pencil onto the paper the text that has been carved on the plate, and take their her own copy with them.
I once read in a book that in China, on many sites of pilgrimage, there used to be (and maybe still are) slabs of stone or plates of wood on which sacred texts had been carved. A pilgrim brought with them a piece of cloth which they placed over the carving and traced with charcoal a copy of the text for themself. This method and culture of copying intrigued me: the original stone slab or wooden plate is an initial point from which words emanate to new places through the copier's ritual act.
These words are not here.
Nothing to be read, no reader.
You have not existed in a long time.
What is left of you is only a fish-ring,
rippling on water, dying down.