Jill Baroff

Jill Baroff's set of Nine Tide Drawings: Corpus Christi, TX, an early example of the artist's continuing Tide-Drawing series, interprets data recorded for forecasting tides. Collected at various geographic locations, in this instance Corpus Christi in Texas, these works plot shifts in water levels in a grid arrangement. Rendering data collected for the purpose of tidal forecasting, these exceptional drawings encapsulate both time and place. Each work in the set depicts the data collected over 24 hours consecutively; the size of each drawing is determined by the overall volume of water that was displaced on this day. Drawn on Japanese gampi paper by hand, the artist mounts the tissue paper-thin drawing onto large sheets of cotton-based (rag) paper. During the mounting process, the drawing is suspended in a water bath before being lifted out onto the support. In 1996 Jill Baroff received a US-Japan Exchange Fellowship by the US National Endowment of the Arts. During the artist's stay in Japan and her subsequent work as visiting ng artist at the Awagami Paper Factory in Japan, Baroff deepened her knowledge of traditional Japanese papermaking techniques. Gampi, a fine tissue-like Japanese paper, has been a key element in Baroff's oeuvre.