I had picked up an unused package of overhead transparencies at a yard sale. Obsolete technology yields art materials. For a few years I had been making the kind of accumulative drawings some of us do, a meditative practice which, in my case, entailed drawing circles together into complex nets. I cut out some circles from the acetate and pinned them to my wall in a little cluster. One evening as I was closing the door to my studio I noticed the way they picked up the light from a far-off street lamp. They had a quality I had not expected, something to do with the random hand-cut shapes, transparency and any bit of light. I switched out the pins for lengths of fishing line jammed into holes in the wall, with their ends pinched to hold the cut discs while allowing for movement. Then built them up in this big undulating wave around Pierre-François Ouellette’s recently opened gallery. He obligingly put up a wall so the gallery would be in half-shadow, with no artificial lights. We installed fans overhead, attached to timers so they would gently stir the discs now and then. A friend stepped in to help attach the many hand-cut pieces to fishing line. It was necessary to have many of them, to be encircled by them, and for them to be hand-cut, to be as organic in feel as possible.

In the back room we hung what I call “water drawings” because that’s what they are, not ink or water colour, just water, drawn in circles on vellum. As the water evaporates it shrinks the paper in circles, creating a bumpy surface. Two versions of this impulse to make an art that you can lose yourself in, with simple materials, handmade irregularities that we feel, intrinsically.

The title comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty describing how, since our bodies and what we are looking at are made of the same stuff, we feel an echo of what we see, like a secret visibility. (In L’Oeil et l’esprit (Eye and Mind), p 18: « Puisque les choses et mon corps sont faits de la même étoffe, il faut que sa vision se fasse de quelque manière en elles, ou encore que leur visibilité manifeste se double en lui d’une visibilité secrète : « la nature est à l’intérieur », dit Cézanne. Qualité, lumière couleur, profondeur, qui sont là-bas devant nous, n’y sont que parce qu’elles éveillent un écho dans notre corps, parce qu’il leur fait accueil. »)