Geraldine Ondrizek

Work On Exhibition

Vera Icona, 1996. 14 Graphic Drawings/Rubbings of Fir Trees on Linen, 24” X 12’

Artist Statement

By placing these thin sheets of evidence before you, I am asking you to believe in the corporeality of what is before your eyes. The appearance of the real is meant to speak of the transit from one state to another as part of a continuum: death to life, light to dark, decay to regeneration.

This work is a direct extension of the Botanical Libraries I have been creating for the last three years. My interest in these forms is to memorialize that which is on the verge of extinction. Although I do wish to directly refer to the trees or plants I use, they are a lens for which we can see our own cruelty and frailty. Mortality is integral to all life. Thus I desperately attempt to stop the disappearance of that life by memorializing it in a work of art.

This exhibition is a result of my numerous visits to the forest on the Northwest Coast. The trees I used for these drawings are Douglas-fir left on the forest floor after clear cutting. Because of their extraordinary form and structure, they cannot be used by the lumber industry. My desire to work in a clear cut, or a graveyards of trees, was a personal impulse to closely inspect that which was left behind. Because of my own encounters with death, I have learned to understand the graveyard as a type of garden. That which falls fertilizes the soil for that which is yet to come.

I began these drawings by laying cloth over the trees to get a light impression of their form and grain pattern. I brought these panels back to my studio and further drew into them to recreate and exaggerate the gesture, grain patterns and cellular structure of each tree. Over the course of the four months, I worked on these panels, I articulated the core of each form by painting wet black graphite and red watercolor into them. This drawing and staining have penetrated the surface of the cloth so that the core is evident on the back of the cloth like a ghost-like image of the whole form.

By layering 14 of these, I wish to express the magnitude of this devastation, and allow the viewer to walk among these beautifully formed sacrificed trees. I hope that the viewer becomes aware of the extraordinary form and structure within the trees that are left to root and regenerate the soil. It is my hope that these appear to be a forest of shrouds, as veils of evidence of the trees that once stood so graciously.

-Geraldine Ondrizek

*"The name Veronica, given to the woman who is said to have wiped Christ's face with her scarf as he carried the cross to Golgotha, is doubtless derived from the words vera icona, the Latin word for true image. " -John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous