JUSTIN QUINN

Exile, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is defined as “Enforced removal from one’s native land according to an edict or sentence; penal expatriation or banishment; the state or condition of being pen ally banished; enforced residence in some foreign land.” (2nd ed., 1989)

In the first chapter of Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby Dick, the source of my prints included in the 13th Tallinn Print Triennial, Ishmael explains how, under the shadow of unquiet mind and soul, he banishes himself from the dry earth and instead chooses to spend years of exile upon a whaling ship. As Ishmael removes himself from land and the familiar world around him, his self-administered punishment becomes the subjection to madness : Captain Ahab’s obsessive quest for the White Whale.

The artist, like Ishmael, often participates in this enforced (self) removal from one’s native land, albeit with a different sense of punishment than what was experienced on Ahab’s whaling ship The Pequod. The place of exile is the studio. The studio is, more often than not, a place of solitary confinement where the artist realizes his or her work far from the distractions of the world. It, like a ship on the endless seas, becomes a surrogate for the world—one that is rewritten for the singular purpose of artistic production. Creature comforts are reduced to essentials as luxuries are defined in terms of making. I can only speak of my own process, as my personal studio is a small, Spartan room with only a couple of tables and chairs with small equipment such as a hammer, pencils, paper and glue, a radio—the bare essentials. Hour after hour and day after day I use cast dies and a hammer to pound letters into copper sheets or a series of pencils to draw on paper. Here my source text translates slowly into lines that pile up into mounds and twist and turn under the weight of their own logic. Like Ahab who nightly redraws his ocean charts in pursuit of Moby Dick (1), I regularly and impulsively return to my work as if charged to do so by some unseen judge.

(1) In chapter 44 of Moby Dick, Captain Ahab works on his ocean charts : “Almost every night some pencil marks were effaced and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.”