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There is a book that I always come back to-my eyes pause whenever I sight it, rest on its title, then linger. As if its bright orange cover is a hypnotic flame. I am not sure why Gaston Bachelard's The Psychoanalysis of Fire is so compelling; perhaps because it is the evocation of 'fire' as something real from the mere utterance of the word, elemental and primal. When our ancestors 'found ' fire, a course was set for survival. One cannot look at Caitlin Reid's soot drawings without thinking about the flame, the combustion which produced it. This is perhaps a different thought trajectory than with, say, charcoal. Do we think of fire then?
Reid's most recent exhibition of smoke drawings (sootworks) coincided with the release of a self-titled monograph published by the Institute of Modern Art. Featuring a text by lhor Holubizky, the monograph documents three bodies of the artist's work (matchwork, dresswork and sootwork) across two fields which title the particularity of the writer's engagements within the book, alternating between 'viewing' and 'overviewing'. In so doing, Holubizky is explicit about the multiple and layered viewing practices that are required of art writing. As a reader of art writing would expect, Holubizky's treatment of the work is equally poetic and thorough. In fact, it is perhaps 'ekphratic', drawing from that classical notion of ekphrasis which generally denotes writing or words which represent something visual in content. I am particularly thinking of, here, that meaning ascribed to ekphrasis as 'a term used to denote poetry or poetic writing concerning itself with the visual arts, artistic objects, and/or highly visual scenes'. ' Locating Reid's work within a context and history of