Tamahagane

Basic Information

Title: Tamahagane
Artist(s): Henry Mandell
Date Created: 2012
Framed Dimensions: 42.75 x 111.5 in.
Unframed Dimensions: 37.75 x 107 in.
Medium: UltraChrome inkjet print on paper
Inventory ID: Mandell-2012-02

Description

excerpt from the artist’s website regarding this work:
“What appears in these paintings as free form linear abstractions are also actually pages of text, reference materials and poetry transformed by hand, line by line using digital tools into the final artworks. That gives them a hidden time based reality, so that if you could run time backwards, they would eventually untangle themselves and return to legible text, each colored line as one individual letter resolving back into the original prose.

Shinagne and Tamahagane are the names of very special kinds of Japanese steel, first made by hand in the 15th century in a sacred process, then forged into the swords of Samurai. The through line here is about transformation though fire of simple elements like iron-sand and carbon into sacred objects. What makes any object sacred?”