BARBARA BOLT (WA) - Uncanny Valley (diptych) 
| Medium: | Works on Paper |
| Materials: | diptych (framed) - watercolour and digital print on archival paper (left panel: digital print on Canson Infinity 300gsm - right panel: watercolour on Saunders Waterford 300gsm |
| Dimensions: | 43.5 x 87.5cm |
| Year: | 2023 |
| Artist: | Barbara Bolt (WA) |
Dirt is a shape shifter. It has a way of insinuating itself into every nook and cranny making and leaving its mark. It is the stuff and agency of matter. What then, is the new articulation of dirt in a digital age? The artwork(s) presented here address this question through the form of the diptych.
On the one hand we have a watercolour. It flows and we get our hands dirty in the making:
I lay in paint
watch and wait
allow the paint to move
wet into wet, wet over dry
not total abandonment
but a lightness of touch
kick into the rhythm
respond to how the paint moves, bleeds, blisses
work with the paint, the sun, the heat and the wind
work in the heat of the moment
work hot
On the other hand, we have the digital. Such a clean medium to work with. No dirt on my hands, under my fingernails or on my clothes. There are affordances that the “program” offers for us to respond to and work with. And then there is “dirt” in the machine, the glitches—blur, pixelation, distortion—that erupt into the work and effect what the work is becoming.
There is another curious quality of the digital. When presented as a print the digital appears immutable. However in the machine it remains forever mutable. Here the undo and re-do buttons allows for correction, the copy function enables iteration and re-iteration and its digital nature allows the image to be multiplied and transmitted ad-infinitum. This is the digital image’s strength but it is also its weakness. It weakens resolve and the re-do button allows for repetition.
The mutability of the watercolour, on the other hand, is of a different order. It is in the mind’s eye. It offers the capacity to imagine whilst its unique materiality is not in itself mutable. This opens up paradox: what is the relationship between the virtual, the mutable, the imagination and the material and what does this mean for the “auratic” quality of the digital? These diptychs are the beginnings of a conversation between the dirt and code, the analogue and the digital.