Paintings & Drawings2020produced

AQUARIUM

Six sheets of coloured card, bleached into sea creatures

A red square of card bleached into pale sea forms: feathered fronds arcing across the top, a fish spine below, a sea urchin with a dark centre bottom right

A tan card with five round urchin forms floating above pale feathered fronds, each with a dark scorched centre — On tan, the bleach goes brown before it goes white.

A red card with a long cream arc sweeping across it, a dark-centred eye at the lower left and fine filaments trailing beneath — One long sweep, and an eye watching it go past.

Six works, and the only ones in the whole archive with colour underneath them. Everywhere else the ground is black paper and the bleach lifts it to gold. Here the ground is card — red, green, tan — and bleach does something else to it entirely: the colour comes away in cream and bone white, with a scorched brown edge where the liquid sat longest.

A red card with broad cream and black masses across the top, a white disc, and fine white roots spreading along the bottom edge — Where the liquid sat longest it scorched instead of lifting.

What surfaces looks like a tide pool. Feathered fronds, a fish spine, sea urchins with dark centres, single eyes, a jellyfish trailing filaments, small bright fragments drifting between them. None of it was drawn as an animal. The bleach spreads through the fibres on its own and finds these shapes each time, which is why the set reads as one habitat rather than six pictures.