copyright (c) 2011-2018, deborah bouchette and aleatoric art. all rights reserved.
please note that the Chaucer drawing machines are forms of original art and under copyright.
My “Chaucer” sculptures are low-tech
drawing machines that make wild, scribbly,
seismographic maps with me while I’m on
the go, whether driving or hiking. The
results reflect more than movement and
geography, though, because they also record
my mood and the weather: a choreography
of the trip. I named the sculpture series after
the poet Geoffrey Chaucer because, like his
characters in The Canterbury Tales, each
sculpture tells a tale of the going and
coming.
Before "twitter" and "tweet" were Internet buzzwords, they described the onomatopoeic
tidings of birds. In our busy lives, we suppress the babble around us, yet energies
continuously ripple through space, bombarding us despite our ambivalence. Instead of
ignoring these energies, I respond to the thrust and parry of vibrations—vocalizations,
cyclical data, weather, waves, tremors—and draw and paint using line and repetition to
describe their pulsing beats. String theory, the flock and flight of birds, and Eugène
Minkowski's description of reverberation as an "inescapable life-force" excite me.
Sometimes I delineate conceptual energy meridians from sketches, photographs, maps,
diagrams, dance, and music.
When I layer depictions of repercussive events, I create a visual density that mimics the
multitude of driving forces in which we move—the background noise that we so easily
push aside. Within the snarl of echoes, negative spaces float like quiescent mezzanines.
My work appears abstract, but it incorporates sound, beat, wave, and reverberation as
metaphors for the ebb and flow, the chaos and calm of life itself.
Chaucer II inside Lucy, my truck
p-Chaucer in France
Chaucer-dx in Alaska
Watch the YouTube video of me explaining my Chaucer-dx travels in Alaska (offsite link).