Title

Three textures.

Author

Orchard, Ken

Source

Butler, Roger. My Head is a Map, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1992.

Publication date

1992

Type

Exhibition catalogue essay

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Three textures, a large hand-coloured woodblock, comprises three abutting panels. In the left-hand panel, a boy and his dog dive from the top left corner down towards the rippling surface of water. In the right-hand panel, a girl with her eyes closed leans forward, clutching a wrap that is draped over her shoulder. In the centre, a figure whose body has been cropped from the frame supports a steaming cup with his raised arm. The cup and the arm provide the focal point for the other two adjacent panels. Through juxtaposition, the content of the three sections becomes bonded into one whole, each element making pictorial and metaphorical references to one another.

In 1985, I produced a series of collaged engravings entitled Disorient world. Some of the original steel engravings, which formed the narrative material for these collages, illustrated a 1911 Chatterbox Annual, a compendium of children’s adventure stories. The female figure derived from an engraving of a small oil painting by William Mulready (1786–1863), now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Its title, Open your mouth and shut your eyes 1838, is the first half of the popular catch phrase ending ‘and see what tomorrow may bring’. I then created the woodcut Three textures, using fragments of images taken from these collages, experimenting with appropriation to create subconscious recognition, and allowing me formal control over types of image reproduction.

The title Three textures alludes to the techniques used by wood engravers in the 19th century to produce different tones. The images were further distorted through the process of photocopying, enlargement, and cutting the woodblocks.

Ken Orchard, 2002