Victoria Burge | Composition A & B
Composition A & Composition B, 2020
2 color etchings
Composition A, soft ground and sugar lift
Composition B, soft ground and aquatint on hand drilled plate
16 5/8th x 13 3/8th inches each
Edition of 10
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Planthouse is pleased to announce Composition A and Composition B, two new etchings by Victoria Burge. Grounded in the grid structure and the concept of graphic notation, Burge’s work explores how visual codes of line, space, and repetition in everyday contexts constitute an infinitely translatable language.
The drawn or printed lines between points in Burge’s imagery evoke stitched threads, sound waves, and organic forms such as fractured light, cobwebs, and neural pathways. Found diagrams from the 19th and 20th centuries—including maps, weavers’ draft notations, and musical scores—frequently provide a substructure for Burge’s drawings and prints. She translates and transforms their data to generate invented patterns.
Composition A and Composition B, printed by Wingate Studio in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, employs the same method of using circles from a grid to generate a pattern. The points are connected geometrically by straight, pencil-thin lines. The pairing of soft-ground etching and sugar-lift in Composition A produces a contrast between the delicate lines and the bold, graphic points. In Composition B, the white ends are created by hand-drilling holes in the copper plate so that, when printed, the white of the paper is untouched in those spots.