The tools, methods and the obsessional cross-hatched lines and matrices of the old engravers really draw me in, and in practice come quite naturally to me. When I hold a steel drawing needle in my hand and push through the wax ground to connect with the metal surface of the etching plate I find my location. But that is not the whole story.

Drawings can be made in many ways, like Organised Accidents, and Actions: the printing plate as a site of significant events. Process emotion, torn out of a metal surface through the vitriolic power of Acidic Consumption. You have to dissolve in order to create.

This is the way the acid works into a drawn line: it won't behave. It side-bites, under-bites and foul-bites, producing marks born directly from corrosion and attrition, infiltrating and infecting the drawing. Utilising this, one of nature's great processes, appears to accelerate and compress time.

Take a drawing through this journey and see the markings printed, standing raised and proud from the surface of the paper like black welts. Then take a magnifying lens, and the drawing becomes a surface to climb into and explore like a new kind of space.

Brian D Hodgson
April 2017