A conversation with artist and curator Giulia Ricci on her piecE ‘Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10’ from ‘Lines of Empathy’
Artwork:
Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10, 2020
Gouache and pencil on paper
120.4 x 100.4 cm
Can you please summarise your practice in a few lines for readers who might not be familiar with it?
My work is based on the use of the grid and I have been exploring configurations of repeated triangles to create multiple focal points, playing with the ambiguity between figure and ground as a way to elicit a tactile and spatial response from the viewer. I mostly draw by hand on paper, but my interest in architecture, surface and tactility has led me to produce works on a range of different materials including walls, glass panes, metal, felt and leather, sometime merging digital and mechanical processes together with the hand made.
Imagine that you were asked to describe Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10, in words, to someone who was unable to view the work itself.
Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10 is made with gouache and pencil on paper. The picture has a rectangular format, in portrait orientation, measuring 120x100 cm and sitting on the sheet of paper with a 2 mm border all around it. The work presents a pattern of right angle triangles, each measuring 20x20 mm, which have been inscribed into a pencil-drawn grid where vertical and horizontal lines have been drawn at a distance of 2 centimetres from each other; the grid has a total of 3,000 squares. Each square in the pencil grid has been divided across in half, forming the outlines of the right angle triangles, which have been painted with copper gouache, which has a metallic sheen. Only one triangle in each square has been painted, thus creating a figure and ground contrast between copper triangles and white triangles resulting from the surface of the paper. In such a grid formation there are only two possible orientations of the individual triangle inscribed into the square; variable conformations of different orientations of triangles have been used to animate the surface of the work. The image of Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10 has a central vertical symmetry where the two halves mirror each other; on each external side of the work there are two vertical bands, while the centre looks like four down-facing arrows, their outlines accentuated by four V-shaped white lines that emerge from adjoining squares where a white triangle faces another unpainted one. Similarly, the adjoining of same coloured triangles (in this case painted) creates a vertical line of larger down-facing copper triangles running along the middle of the artwork, as well as three horizontal lines of parallelograms which intersect this middle line, equidistant from each other.
Can you explain your choice of paper for this work?
The paper is Somerset Satin White, 410gsm, which I buy in sheets measuring 152.4x101.6 cm; this paper also comes in rolls but I cannot work with paper that has been rolled, unless it’s for the purpose of architectural drawings or sketches, because I feel uncomfortable with the tension (or possibly with the idea of tension) of the paper that has been rolled up; I generally store these artworks flat anyway. This is a type of printmaking paper. I chose it for its smooth and velvety surface and ideal level of absorption of gouache, crucial characteristics for this particular body of work where the pencil lines need to be drawn accurately and smoothly, with minimal textural interference. The only down side is that on such a sensitive surface it is not possible to rub off pencil mistakes, therefore I have to be absolutely certain not to make any in the first place.
Why is Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10 the size it is?
As mentioned above, the original sheet is larger than the actual work, so I trim the paper on three sides using a sharp scalpel and a long ruler; this means losing the two deckled edges that are characteristic of this particular paper. I trim the paper to this particular size because it presents proportions which work well from a compositional point of view with a portrait orientation; at this point I should add that Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10 is one of a series in which all the pieces, so far 16, are made with the same paper and feature the same grid of 20x20 mm. It is important that the grid has an even number of rows and columns because this allows for central symmetries in the composition. But there is a more practical side to the scale of this piece. This is to do with what I can handle safely without the risk of damaging the sheet; it is also a size I can work with, in both orientations, on my drawing board, as I need to turn the paper continuously during the making. I store the pieces in my studio at home, protected by conservation tissue paper, sandwiched between thick cardboard sheets that sit above an old architects’ plan chest which is just a little bit smaller than the whole sheet of Somerset paper.
Please could you provide an estimate of how long it took to make this piece and could you detail the role of time in relation to this work?
I have detailed records of when I made the work and how long the execution took, something I write down in situations where I need to manage my time and deadlines particularly tightly or accurately. Before that, though, there is the ideation of the work, which needs to be fully detailed prior to the making. Once I have created a detailed design of the work (something I work out partly with hand-drawn sketches and partly with digital drawing), I often make a life-size sample of a small section of the work, to test things out before committing to the complete piece. As for the execution, and I like to use this word given the strict parameters of the process, there are two parts with regards to the time spent. I generally cut and grid the paper in batches, and then draw the oblique lines that divide each square in a triangle according to the prepared design; the overall pencil drawing takes around five hours for each individual piece. Then I apply the gouache and I noted down that this took seventy-three hours, of which forty-one where devoted to the three outlines of each triangle, while the remaining thirty-two were spent filling them in. I also recorded that this happened over two weeks in August 2020 and the hours were crammed into continuous evenings/nights and entire week ends; that Summer I was frantically trying to make up for the working time I had missed out due to four continuous months of homeschooling. Our daughter’s school decided not to reopen after the first lockdown and unfortunately it was not possible for me to make these pieces in the daytime while homeschooling as I need to concentrate quite intensely for a few hours at a time; Pia was in reception and needed support with the lessons so I had to sit down with her, as she obviously couldn’t read by herself yet. We really enjoyed our time together though, which made the solitary working time very special and intense.
Which tools and materials, paper excluded, were used to create Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10? Did you ever consider them to be an extension of your body whilst making this work? Could you add information regarding where the piece was created? For instance, the surface upon which the paper rested or its positioning during the execution.
For cutting the paper to size I have used a sharp scalpel and a cutting mat. For the gridding of the paper I used a series of four rulers and a mechanical pencil with 0.5 mm HB lead. The mechanical pencil is one of a few I have acquired over the years; it is an old plastic Staedtler which my sister used from 1986 to 1991 for school’s technical drawing, a subject she didn’t pursue further after that, so she kindly handed the pencil over to me. I am very attached to it for sentimental reasons and because it is slim with an excellent grip which makes it very stable to hold and right for the size of my hand. Thinking about this pencil and holding it in my hand as I draft these thoughts is like time travelling; I love the smell of it, especially the grippy rubber section just above the tip, it smells of old stationary shops of my childhood and its texture hasn’t deteriorated in all these years (sometimes rubber can become a bit sticky). The rulers are more recent acquisitions, apart from the 100 cm long one which pre-dates my move to the UK; this metal ruler was made by Antica Fabbrica Vittorio Martini in Bologna, in my home region of Emilia Romagna and when I bought it (around 2001), it was an important purchase for me as a young artist. I also used a 200 cm long Japanese aluminium ruler (which I bought online from a technical drawing tools shop in Berlin), a 60 cm and a 30 cm long ones, of these latter two lengths I have a few different ones. The reason for using all these different rulers is that the pencil drawing requires precision and shifts in scale at different stages, from micro to macro and vice versa; smaller parts of the drawing are more accurately executed with an easier-to-handle ruler. The pigment used in Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10 is Holbein Artists’ Gouache Pearl Copper (G642); this is my favourite make of gouache for its intense pigment and smooth application. I used two brushes: a number 1 for the outlines of the triangles and a number 4 for filling them in. When working, I am fully tuned into the viscosity of the paint and can predict exactly the quantity of paint present in the brush at each time, so that lines aren’t unexpectedly interrupted and excess paint is never dripped accidentally. When I paint the outlines, my hand is always to the right of the line (I am right handed) on the inside of the triangle, which means that I have to turn the paper a lot in order to maintain consistency of my positioning and of the paint’s application.
I made this work on a tilted drawing board with a smooth wooden surface covered by a layer of protective thick paper. Stability is very important in order to maintain consistency while applying the gouache and I adapt my body’s position (occasionally sitting, but more often standing) to the requirements of the work’s execution.
Does your use of paper in this artwork (and any medium and process employed on it) relate to other materials and processes that you utilise elsewhere in your practice? And if yes, in what way?
I think that what is consistent across paper and other surfaces I use is that I need to be very tuned into it from a tactile perspective. If I can choose the material, as in the case of this series of works on paper, I will have researched the choice of paper in combination with the medium in order to identify the right process and finish (I have to become so accustomed to doing the work, to the point where the repetition of the drawing process becomes second nature to me). If I work on a pre-existing surface (such as a wall for a wall drawing or a found material as in the case of the laser engraved pieces on leather and wood), I research the medium/process until I have found a way to work with it and not on it. I guess integration between the surface and my intervention is the aim I try to achieve across my practice.
What is your physical experience of working on paper? Are there any particular experiences related to this drawing that you’d like to mention? For example: something that motivated the artwork initially, or something that happened during the making of it (or afterwards).
Thinking retrospectively at the circumstances in which the making of the work occurred (it is one from a body of work, whose pieces were mostly created during the summer of 2020, as previously mentioned), once I arrived to this particular piece I had got to know really well the paper and the type of pigment, so I was less concerned that I could damage the large sheet of paper while handling it on the drawing board. This is reflected in the many rotations of the sheet that I did in order to maintain consistency of my positioning while I was painting the outlines of the triangles.
I would like you to reflect on Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10 and its relationship with the different senses. Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the five basic ones. However there are several additional senses, such as the vestibular sense (which relates to movement and to our sense of balance) and the proprioceptive sense (which relates to the awareness of our own body in relation to itself). Which ones are more relevant to Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10 and how?
It would be safe to say that touch and sight are the senses that I am more aware of in the way I approach my work. In the making of Alteration/Deviation, Copper no.10 the use of copper gouache has been an interesting example of how my focus on these two particular senses come together. I have been interested in metallic paint and ink for a long time but have struggled to use them, prior to this piece, in a way that wasn’t simply about the preciousness of the metal sheen and its decorative value. In this piece, whether it’s successful or not, I felt that the metallic finish of the copper gouache really came at once with the bodily presence of the work and the image. With the pattern changing direction from one section of the design to the other, the light is reflected in a very different way by the pigment, depending on the direction of its application; this results in subtle movement, which a still image cannot capture as one needs to be in the physical presence of the work to appreciate the changes, so I guess the vestibular sense plays an important role too.
Looking back at my second question about describing the work, could you do this by using an analogy?
The falling down of a liquid substance against a vertical surface (or a water fall seen through a grid pattern?).
The pandemic has accelerated the rethinking of our physicality in relation to so many aspects of our daily lives, from the way we interact with other people to our ability to experience places, prompting urgent questions about equality, health, environment, to name but a few. Do you have any thoughts that you would like to share in relation to this, which are relevant to your practice?
I am glad that these two years have seen climate change and racial inequality being more widely discussed, albeit belatedly. From my tiny (ant) point of view, I have been thinking more about interconnectedness, in the sense that everything and everyone is part of a chain of events in which we all have responsibilities that we should act upon. I have also explored the idea of context (this has been at the origin of Lines of Empathy), something which had been part of my work with patterns where what is seen depends on the point of view.
Giulia Ricci, January 14-25 2022
With questions edited May 2022
Edited June 2022
