Touch of Evil: Japanese subtitles to a film by Orson Wells, 2003 by Stefana McClure

Stefana McClure remarks: "Much of my work makes reference to the structure and visual properties of written language. Although the “text” is sometimes obliterated or partially dismantled, the meaning is always as important as the visual form. From 1986 to 1998 I lived in Kyoto, studying the language and traditional arts, travelling to remote paper-making villages, working as a writer, translator and editor, and, ultimately, thanks to a timely scholarship from the Japanese government, devoting myself to the study of Japanese paper and paper-making at Kyoto Seika University. During this period I watched a lot of films, especially foreign films, and, as I rented most of these from my local video store, they were typically subtitled in Japanese. I have always been fascinated by the grey area that exists between languages and cultures and so was naturally drawn to discrepancies in translation. Not mistakes, exactly, but, specifically, the Japanese translation of female dialogue was consistently softer than in the original language. It was odd to watch strong Western women ending their sentences with tag questions or with phrases like “perhaps” and “I wonder” and I couldn’t help thinking about the distorted impression a non-native speaker would get of the film as a result. Films on Paper, a body of work I have been developing over the past twenty years, is informed, at least in part, by this experience. These drawings methodically remove all of a film’s subtitles, inter-titles or closed captions from a rich monochromatic ground, taking care to ensure that the information removed is formatted exactly as it appeared on the monitor on which the film was originally viewed. Made of transfer paper mounted on cotton rag, or, more recently, aluminium, the drawings are minimal compositions of two blurred lines at the bottom of a monochromatic field and consist of the superimposition of the subtitles or closed captions of an entire movie. To make the drawings I watch a film frame by frame, systematically inscribing all of the subtitles on top of one another on a ground of transfer paper. The process is subtractive: the surface of the paper is slowly eroded as successive layers of information are transferred off. Hours of translated dialogue are reduced to a ghost form, dense in the middle, fading towards the edges. The hypersensitivity and intrinsic memory of the transfer paper enable these multi-layered works to become palimpsests with the iridescent glow of high tech video screens.