Natalie Boyett

These images begin as photographs of my hand holding glass eyes used for taxidermy. (I have a box of many eyes: moose eyes, fish eyes, squirrel eyes, and bird eyes.) When the hand holds an eye, it looks like a face. It looks like a body. The hand feels and the hand sees.

I enlarge the images many times over by tiling together xerox copies to make the whole. This tenuously-tiled monster is then flipped and adhered face-down onto heavyweight paper. The toner ink is hidden now--trapped between the watercolor paper and the xerox printer paper. I soak, peel, and rub the xerox paper backing to reveal the toner beneath. It takes many hours, over many weeks to free the image and effect its complete migration from one paper to the other.

Once revealed, I enter the image again. I rub pastel dust into the surface with my hands. I pull back out with eraser hatching, and in again with more dust. In the end, I like the light of the white paper that shines through areas of transparent toner on this torn, blistered, and mended surface.

--Natalie Boyett