Movement
9
provocation
In her Movement 8, Binda made a praise song drawing for Jenny. On the back she wrote, “Like a bell, she finds her tone.”
response
Jenny
I’ve grown so appreciative, over these last five months, of the visual language Binda has developed, the expressive elements and grammar she combines in such unique and resonant ways. I decided that I wanted to try speaking Binda Colebrook Art.
Last summer I bought a piece of Binda’s called “The Periodic Table,” which shares some pattern language with the bell praisesong image Binda made in Movement 8. “The Periodic Table” hangs in my hallway and I pass it easily 50 times a day. This week I stood and studied it: the main central figure, the radiating energy lines, the energy lines that moved in different patterns from that, the iridescent paint over matte paint, the way she creates gradients and shadows in the background, the color shading… there’s much more that goes into this series of Binda’s paintings, but those were the main things I identified and wanted to try including in my own praise painting for her.
At Cross 9, Binda had talked about the mobius strip again — if you go through her artifacts, you’ll see that it appears again and again. We’ve also talked about the relationship of the mobius strip to the helices we’ve been creating, the helix inverting to show its underside, the visual shift of the strands’ appearing to cross while actually remaining separate — or, conversely, of appearing to be separate while actually being aspects of the same thing.
“Inverse” and “converse” were topics we’d discussed in recent movements, with Binda’s reversed and re-forwarded footage and my own song “Redo.” The word “verse” jumped out at me from those words, because Binda is a fearless soundmaker — or, probably more accurately, she’s not fearless but she does it anyway, a quality I greatly admire. So I decided that the central figure of my painting would be a mouth made of a mobius strip. While I was at it, I thought I might as well put some vampire teeth in.
Then I drove over to the Guild in Easthampton to get some metallic ink. There were so many colors that it was hard to choose, but when I picked up “Bell Bronze,” I knew I had to use that in homage to Binda’s Movement 8.
The third helix weaving in and out of our main helices is meant to represent Dale Rawlinson, our fire-making friend, whose art appears here and elsewhere in this website.
You can see the iridescence better in motion:
The final piece is entitled “Inverse, Converse, Universe, Verse.” inverse, for me, is like the underside of the mobius strip — what happens when the world turns inside-out (and yet it is the same side as the regular side, somehow; it is not “the opposite”). Converse is — I had to look it up actually — when you go in the opposite direction, the reversal of the footage (see Binda’s Movement 9). Universe means “one turn” — uni – verse. One turn that takes in everything. And verse… well, here we are, making sounds that are our lives, the vibration of all the things we are and do.