Dove Bradshaw

...Bradshaw's...Waterstones...focus attention on the ongoing process of disintegration....there are still deeper spiritual implications ...of disintegration, as the entropy theory clearly bears a resemblance to Taoist thought. Tao means "the way" according to the Tao Tê Ching, the classic text attributed to Lao Tzu, the Way may also be called the Valley Spirit or the Water Spirit or the Mysterious Female. The nature of the Water Spirit is that it seeks the low ground. When water has reached the lowest point, it has returned to the state of the Uncarved Block, to the Mysterious Female. Bradshaw, then is using the Way, or the Water Spirit, in the...Waterstones; the liquid flows downward eating away the rock as it seeks the lowest place.

The essence of the Way is ceding control, holding oneself back from intervention as much as possible. ...[Bradshaw] has said, in reference to her role with her materials,"I like to withdraw, " meaning that after setting up the situation she lets the forces of nature take charge and go their own way. Though not the western style, this is nevertheless a strategy for control. As the Tao Tê Ching says, "The sage's way is to act without striving" (LXXXI). "Those that would gain what is under heaven by tampering with it--I have seen that they do not succeed" (XXIX)...A basic image in Taoism is water's ability to wear away stone--a foundational point of Bradshaw's...Waterstone works. "Nothing under heaven is softer or more yielding than water, "says Lao Tzu, "but when it attacks things hard and resistant there is not one of them that can prevail" (LXXVIII). A modern text on Taoist art observes that everything is characterized by perpetual motion because everything is infused with a need to return to the Tao; dripping water, for example, is seeking to return to the Tao. This relationship is encapsulated in the Taoist term for landscape painting, shan-shui, mountain-water. "The term for landscape," a modern scholar writes, "...is...symbolic of the [constant interaction of the] Yang and the Yin. Yang and the yin, in turn, come through in Taoist alchemy as mercury and sulfur, the male and the female of the cosmic marriage. Awareness of this fact was supposed to inculcate in the artist painting a shan-shui "a worshipful attitude, making it a ritual act of reverence in praise of the harmomy of Heaven and Earth."

There seems a dualism in yang and the yin, yet the Tao Tê Ching says they "produce oneness" and in the Taoist painting tradition this was called I-hua (one-painting or painting the oneness). Extrapolating from this idea one could say that Bradshaw's Waterstones are an attempt to paint the oneness. The disintegrated state of entropy, the eating of water into stone, are symbols of dialectical reality, the abandonment of Identity and Excluded Middle--a glimpse of the other side of the crack."

Dove Bradshaw, Nature Change and Indeterminacy, Batty Publisher, West New York, NJ, 2003

			Waterstone, 1996
			Waterstones, 1996 Stark Gallery, New York, 2001
			Waterstones, 1996 Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2000