Margaret Cogswell

Maine Drawings, 2023

The Maine series of drawings are part of a series of works created during a SEARS residency in the fall of 2023, hosted by the Parsonage Gallery in Searsport, Maine.  Arriving in Searsport, I set out with my GoPro camera suspended from a wire at the end of a bamboo pole and hung it off piers alongside other fishermen - only, to their amusement, I was fishing for images and not competing for whatever swam their way!

Another day I stopped along the road and purchased an old fishing net whose long and torn history exploring the waters was marked by careful white lines of stitching. Taking it back to the studio I dipped sections of it into acrylic ink and rolled out parts of its history onto my drawing paper. Reviewing my underwater GoPro footage, I drew and painted into the net so that this time, it was the fishing net that was "catching images".   This torn and stitched fishing net found in Searsport, Maine, is catching images of a past embedded as it drifted under the ocean’s waters in the rising tides.