Hotspot
(riso/silkscreen print)
Hotspot is made in an edition of 24 and 2 AP, on 200 grams Munken Pure paper, signed and numbered. You can order it now for NOK 1600 (without frame and shipping) by sending me an e-mail on mail@michieljansen.nl
During my stay in Salangen in the summer of 2023, I found a feldspar rich granite rock, close to the place I lived. It appealed to me in colour and shape. The pinkish to white gradients together with darker spots made it appear almost humanly. The shape, moulded over hundred thousands of years, has the quality of an archetype stone. Egg shaped, but with enough imperfections to not be machine made to appear very natural.
In my research into the space inside rocks and as a preparation for drilling in stones and splitting them, I decided to drill a hole in this rock by hand. The main purpose was to get a feeling of the hardness and strength of the stone and get the experience of doing it myself with only human force. It took me three hours to get completely through the stone with the use of a hammer and a 14 mm drill bit. The bottom part opened up in four pieces, creating a larger hole.
I took pictures of the stone and separated the colours to make a risoprint of it. The realistic colours were not so important to me anymore, but I really wanted to make an organic, analogue representation of the stone. With three layers of colour I got where I wanted to be. During the drilling of the rock I collected all the dust that was released. The dust was made into fine pigments and I used this to make paint for a silkscreen print of the hole on top of the risoprint.
Hotspot has a direct relationship with volcanos. First of all this specific rock is created underground, by slowly solidified magma. The title of the work refers loosely to one of the three situations of earth surfaces where volcanos can erupt. The vent and magma chamber, two elements of a volcano are visible on the print and conceptually present in the work.
When a volcano erupts it creates the well known triangular shaped mountain by pushing out lava through the vent. At the same time, the vent is being created by the solidified lava which makes the volcano mountain. One cannot exist without the other and they grow in existence at the same time. In the case of the stone, the ‘mountain’ is already there. The hole was made afterwards and this changed the identity of the rock. It’s no longer an ordinary rock, but a rock with a hole in it, or has it become a hole with a stone around? This raises a question on the definition of space and emptiness: only when we have mass around the emptiness, we can define and experience the space of it. Space only exists by the container around it. In the case of the rock the mass was already there. When I took out a part of the inside of the rock, I created an empty space. Now the rock became the bearer of the hole.
