THE CONTOURS OF SOMETHING

Heidi Wood designates but does not communicate, even though she delivers signals that are almost signage. She offers the forms to us as she found them in this indistinct zone that brings together reality as representation and representation as reality. Taken from landscapes modified by the images that adopted them. She eliminates, she detaches, she extracts signs from the environment where they sluggishly drew attention to themselves, signaling above all an alliance or appearance. De-signating, she de-tects, de-limits, de-viates, de-signs. Draws.

 

Drawing in the original sense of the word, to designate, “tracing the outlines of something.” Something visible or invisible, attainable or unreal, limpid or inexplicable. Opposites often united until drawing set them apart. Heidi Wood disconnects the sign from its referent, giving us signs striped of their meaning, extracted from the world and placed naked before their reproduction. Detached from the world we understand and its continuous good sense.

 

Yet Heidi Wood does not seek to deconstruct, even though we would gladly see in her rigorous sketches and random maps the tools for designing infrastructure and cobbling together a superstructure. Instead, we sense an attempt to recompose and launch. For the form to go beyond the form and the sign to reveal the sign; in short that the esthetic revelation regenerates the semiotic anesthesia. After emptying out the evidence, to be able to trace the contours of something else.

 

“Like dreams, drawing works toward separation, but as with dreams, its links with reality are not entirely broken.”

Philippe-Alain MICHAUD

 

Jacques Norigeon

Catalogue Carnet Sagace 20

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