Mel Kendrick

"Kendrick describes and often makes his works on paper in sculptural terms. For the past year, he’s been pursuing what he calls 'Water Drawings,' a series of cast-paper drawings comprising two 40-by-60-inch sheets created at Dieu Donné papermaking workshop in New York. A black pigment-coated mold is pressed into a soft mass of wet pulp, and under the force of the press the pigment spreads into the paper and binds with it.



The resulting sheets are weighty-looking reliefs, with deep imprints and overlapping forms that resemble topographical views, like lakes or islands seen from an airplane window. There’s also a kind of transparency to the overlapping forms, a sense of looking through one thing and connecting to another. In the act of looking, 'what’s on top becomes the bottom. There’s a constant exchange that gives them an internal logic.'" ~Meghan Dailey, Art Critic