New Works
Terry Winters
Secret Knots, 2008
Portfolio of 10 intaglios with photogravure and spit-bite aquatint on Lana Concord RAC natural white
17 1/4 in. x 20 1/4 in. (43.82 cm x 51.44 cm)
Publisher's seal embossed lower right
Edition 36
Set $15,000
In Secret Knots, a portfolio of ten photogravures, Terry Winters takes the realms of nature, technology, and mathematics and fuses them to create new pictures of the world. Although they are related to a body of drawings and paintings, their production with intaglio processes and digital technologies—whereby drawings were scanned in Winters’ studio, transmitted to ULAE, processed, and proofed for further work by the artist—release new qualities and dimensions of meaning.
Winters’ etched iconography of protean forms mediates between organic and conceptual identities. Clusters of excitable nodules or “knots” float amidst open lattices and concentric circular and ovoid bands. In each of the photogravures, varying assemblages of knots are registered in black ink against flushes of colored aquatinted grounds and line work. A spectral sequence of fuchsia, coral, pink, orange, yellow, sea green, blue, turquoise, purple, and slate gray unifies the portfolio for a lyrical singularity.
Knot theory, a branch of topology that studies embeddings of a circle in three dimensions, begins with a consideration of space. Winters transforms mathematical images of knot structures by submitting them to different graphic systems, mapping out a fictive and original contemporary space. In the prints, the transfigured knot, lodged in a black-inked nodal point, is a negative line of unprinted paper, an endless and tangled loop inside itself. Each knot contains its own topological infinity. In dense networks of coagulating and dispersing masses, Winters’ mysterious knots are in perpetual motion, phasing into new forms through endless cycles, never at rest.
The complex identity of things in Winters’ images, which resonate with multiple associations, rests in the blurring between abstract and figural form, science and the irrational, and mathematical model and intuitive design. Winters’ portfolio, Secret Knots, renders the invisible as both visual fact and poetic fancy.
Essay by Richard H. Axsom
24 / 24
