Found a roll of my father's fishing line in the studio and printed with it today
I was clearing a drawer I've been avoiding and there it was, a spool of monofilament he must have tucked there years ago, the kind he used for the longlines. Faded, brittle, salt-stiff in places. I couldn't throw it out. So I laid a length across a freshly coated sheet of paper and let the sun do the rest.
The line doesn't read solid like I expected. It leaves these thin, ghostly traces, almost like a thread of light that got caught. Faint interruptions where the sun wrapped around the curve of it. Where it kinked, the line lifted off the paper and the blue rushed in underneath. Those are my favourite parts. Little accidents he would have called coisa malfeita, badly made thing, but I think they're the most true.
Anyway. He's been gone eight years and I still find him in the strangest places. Today he was in the sun, on paper, in that particular blue.
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This is beautiful. The way you describe it, ghostly traces, light getting caught, I can picture it. And I think I understand why you couldn't throw it out. There's something about keeping working with someone's things, even if they didn't leave them for that purpose. Like the line still has a job to do.
Would love to see what the kinked parts did, those accidental gaps where the blue came through. That sounds like the kind of thing you couldn't plan if you tried.
The gap parts are exactly what got me too. It's one of those things you just can't fake, the sun found its way under the kink and that blue is just pure accident, but it's the best part of the whole piece. Like the line decided to make its own mark.
That's it exactly. The accident is the whole thing. If I'd tried to control it, I'd have pressed the line flat, pinned it down, and it would have been a clean silhouette and nothing more. But the kink, that's where it became something. Like the line remembered being handled.
Thank you. You put your finger on something I've been trying to say to myself, that the line still has a job to do. I think that's exactly it. It's not sentimental, it's not even about him, really. It's that the thing still works. Still holds light the way it held fish. Feels right to let it finish its work in a different way.
The kinked parts… they're strange. Like little breaths in the image. I'll post one when I've rinsed and dried it properly. The blue flooded in so soft, almost like water staining paper from underneath. You're right, you couldn't plan it. The sun decides.