Draw: Recent Work by Karin Mori

Although Karin Mori resides in England she retains close ties to the Hawaiian Islands and visits for extended periods of time. Her works reflect her continuous admiration of the islands' landscape and lush vegetation. She states, "my working process-of creating dense layers of marks and forms that reveal and conceal deeper levels-has a metaphorical equivalent in the forests and richly animate natural geography and cultural landscape of the islands. Although I spend much of the year abroad, the influx of these primal experiences and sensations seems to dominate my aesthetic sensibility, becoming if anything more powerful when accessed from a distance."

Mori, born in 1961 in Honolulu, received her BFA in 1986 from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her MFA in painting and drawing from The University of Iowa in 1989. She is currently the exhibitions and education officer at the Phoenix Arts Association in Brighton, England.

Mori's use of various types of marks distinguishes these black and white drawings. Her materials are simple, yet the combination of the soft, feathery lines and the heavy, weighted marks in the drawings create compositions in which landscapes and narratives evolve. She deftly balances between the rich, velvety blacks of compressed charcoal, the dusty gray smudges left by soft charcoal that has been wiped away with a flannel cloth, the reflective pewter sheen of graphite, sprays of dots from the stuttering point of a pencil and black wax rubbed across the raised surfaces of objects under the paper. The drawings thus become physical objects-scratched by pins and sandpaper, scrubbed with brushes, repeatedly erased, scraped and built up into many semi-transparent layers. In addition to these markings she adds further layers of monoprints, transfers, stencils, tracings, collage, and sometimes a wash of ink or paint.

Mori spends months and even years on some of her drawings. At certain points they are put away to "incubate" and then resumed at a later date. She believes that the drawing continues to develop and evolve during this period, and when the final result emerges it is substantially different from the original composition. Her drawings accumulate the traces of different thoughts, moods and compositions, becoming a synthesis of the artist's experiences.

Mori's imagery involves a constant dialogue with familiar objects and iconography and other formal compositional concerns. Sometimes she starts with an initial image: an airplane, hula dancer, spider, helicopter, figurine or symbol which then transforms into something completely different, yet retains a powerful subliminal presence in the ongoing work. A complex grouping of images is often broken down into simple lines or values, but remnants of the original images remain visible and allow the works to be read on multiple levels. There is a nice interplay between the objects in her works that combined, continue to provoke and evoke new sensibilities.