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Graduate School Palimpsest

Ink and Graphite on Paper

Many of the notes that I have been taking throughout the semester have been spread across numerous notepads, loose sheets of paper and journals. In most cases I use them as a way to organize my thoughts rather than be a resource to refer back to. In one such instant I jotted down the order of the photographs that I was using in my image list for one of my course papers. On the same page I had written down the name of an artist who I had come across while looking through Instagram. The sporadic moments of pen to paper captured moments of time, anxiety and boredom in my handwriting. I never attempted to eradicate my notes to make space for new ones, instead I would simply flip the paper over and use the other side. This action was my erasure. In order to reveal the reverse surface and the ink which has been soaked in, I positioned these loose notes on a light box to capture the two converging planes. With this project I wanted to refer back to the traditional understanding of palimpsest, that being parchment paper that has been imperfectly erased two or three times for reuse.

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