ARTISTS TALKING

Drawing over images, spaces,
systems or stories, is a way to get inside them.

I seek a detail: an aspect of the original that I recognise, desire, or hope to understand. At finding it, I detour.
The detail comes along.

Its selection might seem
random: A dropped thread, a
footnote, a character in the background.
We go on a tangent. With one foot inside, the other wanders off.

We can be made of anything; it depends on where we start.

If the initial subject is clay, I
will work in clay. If it is text I may
write. If it is out of reach, I’ll steal it in a mirror.

Drawing, making, and repeating a thing helps me to perceive it. So does cutting it out.

Isolating details is like making
bubbles.
When boundaries are erased, things become invisible.

And vice versa.

Love depends on the ability to
separate a someone out from the everyone.

An extra becomes the protagonist,
after the film is made.

What is considered banal, or even cliché, is often hiding something.

I like secrets, not in their exposure
but in their very existence.
People and places carry histories
and stories, and they are good
materials. Permission is a
material and changes the work’s
consistency.

The only way I know a thing is to touch it, and to let it touch me.

Jill Magid is an American artist living in Amsterdam. Her project Evidence Locker includes videos, text, and sound installation and will be shown at Tate Liverpool and FACT as part of the Liverpool Biennial 18 September ' 28 November.

www.systemazure.com
www.biennial.org.uk
www.evidencelocker.net