Jane Dixon

Works from Regeneration

2 May - 14 June 2008

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Regeneration II (Chicago), 2007, etching, 40.5 x 58.5cm

The genesis of Regeneration was ten years ago when I began to visit and photograph cities which had been destroyed by war, or by other man-made or natural causes and subsequently rebuilt. The cities of Berlin, Chicago, Tokyo and Yokohama have since become the focus through which to explore ideas of loss and impermanence and the restructuring of our occupied space, both real and through memory. All the works are concerned with one thing taking the place of another in our physical world and collective consciousness, the disappearance and replacement of physical structures: lost and found space.

City Index, 2006-07, graphite on graph paper, 108 x 212cm

The project is ongoing and organic in structure – fitting for its subject. Part one (from which this exhibition is selected) consists of the print series and the ‘rubbed drawings’. The second part is in development and will incorporate other mixed media work. It is planned that the complete project, Regeneration, will subsequently be shown as a whole.

Berlin I, 2007, graphite on gesso on polyester, 99 x 147cm

City Index is a composite piece of thirty five small drawings, made onto graph paper. It acts as a metaphorical index or visual guide to the body of work as a whole: to Regeneration. The images City Index contains are, in many cases, revisited and developed elsewhere in the large drawings or prints and built into its structure are conceptual punctuations (repetitions of an image; rubbings from braille text etching plates…) which are again an indicator of the structure and content of other, larger works.

Remade, 2006, graphite on paper, 109 x 231cm

The drawings both within City Index and throughout Regeneration are made of layers of rubbings which intensify the conceptual alignment between subject and method. They relate the visual with some of the physical processes employed by archaeology or forensic science (for instance the methodical revelation of a surface or the analysis of the past through exposed layers). I think of the drawings as urban palimpsests or artificial excavations. The ‘rubbings’ are taken from the walls of existing buildings and from the surfaces of acrylic paintings which I have made as part of the process but which are subsequently discarded. They are made on paper of various types or specially constructed material. The completed layers of the drawings therefore incorporate both the real and the manufactured: the factual and the filtered imagery of memory. The drawings are hybrid works which use the physicality of painting to create something ephemeral, a reversal in the normal order of things.

Floorplan V, 2007, graphite on graph paper, 84.5 x 59.5cm

There are two sets of prints currently incorporated within the project: Regeneration Suite is a set of four etchings which utilize most directly the photographs of specific cityscapes and which increase the discrepancy between visual and physical three dimensionality, creating a dialogue between digital and analogue processes. The Braille Suite is a set of five etchings based on individual texts extracted from Italo Calvino’s book ‘Invisible Cities’. The extracts are transcribed into braille and printed as blind embossed etchings. Presented in a language of touch rather than sight, and yet unreadable behind glass, they make the cities they describe inaccessible to us: at once found and lost.

Detail from Braille Suite, 2006, blind-embossed etching, plate size: 21 x 29.5cm, sheet size: 38.5 x 47.5cm

The dichotomy of absence and presence has always been integral to my work: the evidence or trace of something which stands as a reminder of society’s vulnerabilities and also those of the individual. The metaphor of the city and of isolated buildings is for me an interesting one, the balance between the precarious and the sustainable. The city contains elements of both the past and future, it is in a sense transitional in spite of its physicality and so the use of photography as source material seems apt because of the inherent paradox of making something which is fleeting, a moment in time, permanent. The cities I am photographing have, on the whole, already regenerated after destruction or damage and so I am reflecting on the past and anticipating a possible, changed future: a blueprint for the unknown.

Jane Dixon - March 2008

Jane Dixon attended the West Surrey College of Art and Design from 1983 - 86 where she obtained a B.A. Hons Fine Art and then went onto the Royal College of Art, London where she obatined an M.A. in Printmaking. Dixon lives and works in London.