Watermarks began its life with an accident. A leak from a pipe running across the ceiling of Alice Oehr's studio sent dusty, blackened water down onto her desk. What could've been a disaster became an opening. Because what caught the torrent was a box of coloured paper, remnants from a collage workshop collected together in no cohesive order. Orange bled into yellow and purple and green. Textures emerged organically, in tie-dyed patterns that no human hand or mind could have conceived of intentionally.
The dried and scanned relics of this delightful mistake form the textured background layers of Watermark's screenprinted vases in tizzy, gaudy patterns. Drawing on a lifelong appreciation for still life and a career spent translating ornamental objects into colourful 2D renderings, Oehr has used this collection of flattened pots as a vessel – no pun intended – for exploring ideas of pattern and texture, and finding humility in hand-making.
The series is a testament to working with what you have – paint, pastel, colour, lines, patterns, stencils – and to relinquishing control. The process of screenprinting is a physical, unforgiving and humbling one, but each misregistered layer or shadow of a fingerprint is a reminder of the hand that made the work.
In his book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, author Leonard Koren writes, "Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view." When those circumstances look like working by hand, experimenting with watercolours during a heatwave, cutting paper or playing with temperamental materials under a threatening pipe, all it takes is a shift in perspective to see potential in place of disaster, success in lieu of mistake. "I think it's a response to working digitally – where you're so controlled, and everything is perfect," Oehr explains. "I need to see those imperfections to feel something."