“Hitchcock’s Coal” is a series of three handwoven details of a geologic diagram made by Orra White Hitchcock in the mid-19th century. The works employ magnification and intricately woven colour to focus on the physical qualities of Hitchcock’s medium; ink on linen, and her subject, structural geology.

The behaviour of ink on linen defies the language of diagrams. Hitchcock’s geometry is betrayed by fluid colours that bleed through the matrix of her substrate into adjacent chromatic fields. In these pools of blended colour, ‘hard knowledge’ dissolves, and the event of a woman putting brush to canvas surfaces. The time of ink and the body runs through the deep time of her geologic subject.

Transposed into woven textile, Hitchcock’s ink, cloth, image, and subject become one, as threads build surface in a process of vertical accrual akin to sedimentation. Through this processing, the diagram crosses a line between image and object, representation and subject; moving from being about the world, to being in it.