MAKING OF A LIGHT OBJECT

A sheet of black paper on a white table, and a nib loaded with bleach. Over about a minute the sheet fills: a bird-headed figure, a bare tree, a hand holding a cube, a standing man, a run of small marks along the bottom edge. The paper is folded twice across its width, so the scene arrives in three panels. Bleach removes rather than adds. Every line is dye lifted out of the sheet, and the colour is whatever the black gives up — copper where the nib passes once, cream where it sits longest. Nothing is painted on. The drawing is a subtraction, made at the speed of a pen. The panel was drawn to be lit from behind: light passes where the dye is gone. The footage stops at the finished sheet, so the object in its lit state is not on record here. What survives is the making, and it survives whole — blank paper to full scene, in order.