This work is part of a series that emerged from Rockburne’s desire to make drawings “based on information contained within the paper and not on any other information.” Using the paper not only as the drawings’s support but as their medium, she folded and creased the thick sheets with differing amounts of pressure, creating ridges and planes of varying thickness and shape. She drew additional lines into the creases and around the previous folds, sometimes in graphite, sometimes in ink, as a way to underscore the process of the paper “acting upon itself.”

Gallery label from

Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing Which Makes Itself, September 21, 2013–January 20, 2014.

Medium Folded paper and ink
Dimensions 30 x 40" (76.2 x 101.5 cm)
Credit Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund
Object number 303.1974
Department Drawings and Prints

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