My practice centers on the connections between pattern and repetition, textile processes and mathematical thinking. My chosen ground is painters’ canvas, a woven textile, which I deconstruct in order to enable the employment of various textile processes to this material, such as stitching and knotting.

Lately, I have been referencing the grid patterns of loom punch cards, which produced manufactured patterned textiles, in my works. In a sense I am reclaiming these industrial binary coded patterns and turning a plain woven textile, my canvas, back into a hand-made patterned artwork.

Visible Silence
In the words of Saskia Scott, artist and curator, “Dohrmann’s work makes visible the underlying properties of the material (canvas). The form of the canvas – a construction of woven thread – ceases to be a merely functional surface.”

Repetitive, labour-intensive processes are key to my practice. The spaces of peace and calmness they create for me are somehow transferred into the emotional sensibility inherent in the final outcomes.

The ideas surveyed in this work are of an anthropological matter, represented through the use of abstract symbolism. By considering the universality of the hand drawn straight line allows for interpretations which can date back to imaginings of Palaeolithic age peoples who were beginning to discover the way a line could be used to visually articulate human thought. By taking the ideas of the line back to the time of Palaeolithic mythology, the line is able to transcend history, time and a plurality of cultures, where today, its relevance is continued.

Through this idea, the hand drawn straight line works as a type of bridge that connects the present to a Palaeolithic age when humans were discovering visual languages, however, this is not a moment that could ever be pinpointed, so it remains mythologised. Therefore, the connection to the scratching and painting of rocks done some tens of thousands of years ago is abstracted over time, developing a void in our current understanding of its original birth. The bridge works as a type of silent path; the access remains as the ideas of visual languages through the use and development of line has continued and passed on through generations of people, while the path also carries a silence created from the years past.

Visible silence is the narrative of deep time. It is the time taken for a mountain range to become a gibber plain. It is the processes of change embodied in rocks, in fossils, in the signifiers of our landscape that surround us and give us our touchstones for life and culture.

Visible silence is also a cultural narrative, palpable and inert … the silence of our violent colonial history, the silence of inequality, the silence surrounding the disintegration of the natural world.