Me and the Caterpillar III

Me and the Caterpillar III is a work from the Me and the Caterpillar series, which takes old photographs preserved in the artist’s family album as its point of departure, exploring the structure of painting and the distance between memory and image.

The photographs depict events and people that certainly once existed, yet they are scarcely connected to the artist’s own memory. Images that “remain as photographs but lack a tangible sense as memory” are also referenced in this work.

In this piece, a strong contrast is established between the “figure” placed at the center of the composition and the frame-like “ground” surrounding it, painted with acrylic gouache. The fabric support is dyed by the artist’s own hand and treated with dosa to fix the drawing materials. The forms are rendered in transparent watercolor, with only minimal information intentionally retained on the surface.

In III, through the repetition of the series’ method, subtle shifts and instabilities in the image become more clearly visible. The forms extracted from photographs do not function to explain specific narratives or emotions, but rather operate as traces of an ambiguous presence drifting between memory and record.

Me and the Caterpillar III is an attempt, within a completed series, to quietly reexamine how the distance between the “self” and the “image” may change, continuing to question the process by which images are translated into material form.