Me and the Caterpillar IV

Me and the Caterpillar IV 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 information intentionally reduced to a minimum.

In IV, through the repetition of the method used throughout the series, the relationship between color and structure becomes more pronounced, and the contours of the image appear increasingly uncertain. The forms extracted from photographs do not serve to explain specific narratives or emotions, but instead function as traces of an ambiguous presence drifting between memory and record.

Positioned in the latter half of the completed series, Me and the Caterpillar IV is a quiet attempt to retrace the accumulated structure while examining how the distance between the “self” and the “image” may transform, continuing to question the process by which images are translated into material form.