Awake! awake!...Malcolm! awake! (#23 from the series Life As We Know It)
Support (a): 26 1/16 × 41 1/8 in. (66.2 × 104.5 cm)
Image (b): 6 13/16 × 40 15/16 in. (17.3 × 104 cm)
Support (b): 26 1/16 × 41 3/8 in. (66.2 × 105.1 cm)
Here lay Duncan: A horizontal band runs across the center of the paper, slightly angled. Different densities of hatch marks create a pattern of waves near this axis, while most of the paper remains blank.
eMuseum Notes
Christine Taylor Patten is a longtime northern New Mexico resident who works with ink and a crowquill pen. She arrives at abstract imagery from a multitude of hatch marks in varying densities and that is often characterized by a fulcrum or turning point that allows the composition to be bisected. This diptych was made on the occasion of the 2004 Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. The individual titles of the diptych halves refer to lines and characters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Malcolm—the son of the benevolent King Duncan, whom Macbeth murders—is the character who restores order to the throne after Macbeth’s tyrannical rule. Malcolm is also the name of Patten’s father, in whose memory she made the drawing.
This diptych is part of the Life As We Know It series, which was inspired by Patten’s work with holography. In her holography lab, she made observations about coherent wave forms and patterns versus randomness. Her subsequent thinking was both physics-related and concerned with the dynamics of change and how we mimic this in our daily lives and behaviors.