And so it was that the bookwork drove me into the arms of the machine. Here is my story: I can't say that I woke up one morning and found myself in bed with the computer. My love affair with art was a youthful thing, impractical and highly idyllic. But my tryst with the photocopier was fully sordid and adult. We met at the office. The photocopier made itself invaluable to me by enlarging, reducing and reproducing endlessly. I would tell my friends that I had to work late. I would stay for hours after closing, making collages seemingly out of nothing, liberated in no uncertain terms, or so I thought, from physicality and from preciousness. Guilty of white lies, laziness and copyright infringement, I would scrub my toner stained hands before leaving the office. In her book, Enfleshings, the late (great) British artist Helen Chadwick spoke of mutability in her work with photocopied images:
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"Out of the copier, no longer separate from other things, I am now limitless. The essential elementary self is gone, evaporated into a vigorous plurality of interactions. I discharge myself, time and time again, in a discontinuous flow, a passage of impossible state leaping into successive configurations. These are dynamic allegories for events to be; a spectrum of desires and impulses, willed, personalized then freely rescinded to corrupt into fresh fictions. Within each event the position of things is given, but the emotive momentum is left hanging. It may be perceived literally as an outwardly manifest reality, a mirror, or experienced by the eye alone, but will only become palpably real if felt deep within the reflexive domain of introspection."
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