It's hard to see the body, the artists seem to say, without these agonised inter-mediaries, part wall and part slit. Thus, while the organ might be perfectly natural, everything that surrounds it is neurotically cultural, from the language of the clothing to the dynamic of looking, a theatre of contrived openings around which people jockey for superior access or narcissistic display. There is one art that naturally proceeds by slits, namely print making. Especially in engraving and etching, the image is prepared by slicing into a surface with a sharp instrument or with acid. The negative form, the slit, takes the ink and, under pressure, produces the positive mark on the paper.
Print makers are often demonstrative about their slits.
Natalie Webster at the Australian Print Workshop has created images with emphatic spear-shaped elements, mostly aligned in a kind of force field. The unit of representation acknowledges the carving of a surface for the purpose of printing. The teapot for her Tea Ceremony is animated and remarkably watertight for all its slits. In the same exhibition, entitled Drawn , Louise Donovan's drypoints of piers and boats are emphatically slit and rather beautiful, while Andrew Sinclair shows great tact in the images that are naturally slit through etching and those in mezzotint that aren't. Mezzotint, which has no gouges, seems cerebral and mysterious beside the etchings.