Diane Victor’s work, The Rain Horse, formed part of this exhibition.
Diane teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at UP, and comments that working with materials that are normally perceived as redundant and wasted has always interested her.
She uses the by-products of fire, and draws with the smoke and soot from candles, and with the ash obtained from burning and grinding up books. She started using book ash as a medium in drawing elderly and terminally ill people. Asking them to provide a short list of books that had influenced them or made an impression on their lives, she would search in second-hand bookshops for these texts, char the books and grind them up as raw material for her drawings. The motivation behind this was the saying, ‘When an old woman dies, it’s like an entire library burning down’.
In The Rain Horse she used the ash remaining from a number of portraits, mulled together, as her drawing material.
Her interest is in the fragility and vulnerability of both ash and smoke, and in her words, “working with a medium already burned out, extinguished and all used up within the general frame of things.
“I am interested in offering ‘second lives’ to expended and unwanted materials but am also attracted on a technical level to both materials as they offer alternative solutions and challenges to my drawing process, which I cannot find in more traditional materials.”
