Amie Oliver / Virginia, USA

above: collaborative work with Iranian master calligrapher Jamshid Mardan
below: Heaven, Earth and Sea Series (River walk) 2011
ink on synthetic paper
32 x 44 inches
2011

As a hill walker and traveler, journals and agendas are an essential aspect of my creative process. My work catalogs the passing of time and experience, and possesses an inherent motion. I like to think of it as a mobile museum/library, which I could take on my bicycle, or float down the Seine if I wanted to - a message in - and sometimes without - a bottle. Weather, wind and rain aside, the journey prevails. Paper is the ideal material for my process: synthetic, organic, or handmade, it is timeless, honest and most of all, personal as clothing. It travels well.

The Heaven, Earth and Sea series began during 2009 in Tibet. The Metasenta Moving Cultures Project resulted in work on paper that skirts with western tradition and its illusions of permanence, place or time. As small as the world seems, the sky is vast. These paintings attempt to bridge the great divide between the east and west, north and south, light and dark. During a Paris residency earlier this year the city was nearly brought to its knees by an eight month drought. I returned home to witness the fires in Texas on all media outlets. I dream of the water table, paint its residue and am caught in the pattern of its floods and tides. It is the source of life and my element.

Ink, in its many forms is the primary vehicle for this body of work. It can be as opaque or transparent as black ice or a spring rain. It reveals the history of a surface as it is stubborn in its permanence. It can be scrubbed, inscribed or as fluid as watercolor and is a material I’ve known since I first scribbled in my parents’ books with a Bic pen. More common than graphite and still, perhaps, the most permanent record of our time. I love it.