Feature: Angela Bartram - 366:366 (eventually; animated; finally), 2016-2020

For the leap year of 2016 I exhaled on an etching plate every day, at roughly 8pm. 366 breaths layered on the same surface, in the same place, and at roughly the same time. Each breath took about four seconds to lay on an A5 zinc etching plate. So, roughly 1464 seconds in total, or just over twenty-four minutes, or a third of an hour…that is a lot of breath. I had worked with the mouth as an instrument for drawing and object making in performances and other ways for years, and this work is part of that practice. The mouth, what some theorists would term a vulnerable orifice, made useful and invulnerable (perhaps) through creative process. But surely this was doomed to failure, for how could breathing produce an image in this way? Really, I didn’t care. For this was an exploration of repetition within process, the mundane within the order of making.

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