Statement

My mother smoked. She always had a cigarette lit sitting at the dining room table in her suburban ranch house entertaining or talking on the phone, or up in the middle of the night still at the dining room table, smoking, but alone and quietly withdrawn. It was like a vigil she kept during her final years until the nicotine stains discolored the white ceilings and floral wallpaper patterns of the house to a tarnished gold.

The accumulated images in nicotine form a double portrait of a mother and son, my mother in the last years of her life plagued by addiction, illness and a desperate feeling of abandonment, and myself as her only son and my repeated attempts to preserve her legacy in my memory.

Process

High resolution digital photographs are made into film positives (halftone dot matrix) and burned into silk screens with a high mesh count.

The screens are placed over the top of box–like constructions that imitate the walls and ceilings of an enclosed room. The boxes are made in a variety of sizes depending on the size of the images being made.

Ashtrays filled with lit and smoldering cigarettes are placed into the bottom of the boxes beneath the screens. The nicotine contained in the smoke from the cigarettes passes through the dot matrix in the silk mesh and slowly the paper becomes stained with the image embedded in the screen.

Despite the use of a commercial screen-printing technique each work is unique. The heat from the cigarettes slowly melts the accumulating nicotine into the mesh and burns out the image destroying the screen, also, unlike printmaking techniques where the ink is pushed through the screen with a squeegee, and the dark and light values are relatively fixed, the smoke passing through the mesh can be manipulated by the number of cigarettes smoldering at the same time beneath the screen or by moving the cigarettes beneath the images so that the values in areas of each image can be deliberately manipulated - more in line with techniques used in drawing where erasures and pressure and the quantity of the medium used can account for subtle differences in the rendered image.

Each image requires a repetitive build up of numerous layers of nicotine, anywhere from as few as three to as many as one hundred cigarettes are used in a single layer and a minimum of five or six layers are required to produce a single image. Larger works require three or four times as many layers for a single image.