Art I like - Elissa Levy

Usually fringes and fraying - especially fraying - send me running, but this has me looking and thinking -

Spin (Newly Born), 2011

Newspaper, gouache, gel pen, spray paint, 37" x 32.5"

The colour and the form held my eye, and I had to enlarge the photo (and read the statement) to see the content - the concentration on the core of the body, the allusion to phantom limbs.

The fringing reminds me of the reason those frontiersman buckskin jackets have fringes - to draw the rain off the body - it drips down off the fringes, rather than soaks in. The touches of colour are like a liquid, or something less physical, seeping out, ready to drip away. The central colour is core heat, like inside a volcano, or a very very vivid sunset foretelling a change in the weather. The delicate strips of paper will move gently as someone walks past. The newspaper will age and yellow. As a material, it reminds me of its use as wallpaper in the humblest of dwellings, layers on layers struggling to keep out the wind; the way wallpaper can come off at the edges....

That's what, from a distance, it says to me. In the context of her other work, that reading changes.