Doornkaat's intricate drawings explore mark-making as compound memory. Constructed from layer upon layer of rectilinear geometries, obsessively serialised marks and lines, her work incorporates process as signifier of human response to both the experiential, as defined by materials and memory, and the mind’s abstract construction of form and meaning.
“The Greek made a great discovery. They discovered that in Nature there are no perfect circles or straight lines or equal spaces. Yet...in their minds they could see them and...they were then able to make them.”
"When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection." Agnes Martin.
Ten Doornkaat's complex layering of grid and patchwork motifs create a tense interplay between intuitive, subjective responses to colour, space, texture and mechanical process. Whether shaped by the rhythmic pulsation of industrial hand tools as in the ‘Drill Drawings’ or the obsessive construction of perfect grids and chromatic harmonies each approach to the sublime of perfect form is repeated endlessly as the seeming real is lost, then recovered, resulting in repetitive layering and scratching away. Thus, a self-perpetuating ontological dialogue is created with the resulting ripped, torn, sanded or collaged surfaces that both create and reveal a dense archaeology of memory and tantalisingly elusive signification. Each lost silent utterance holds memory of its own. It is this memory, memory as space and presence that is the very essence of what she seeks: an ontological space for the process of drawing itself.
Martin Kerrison (artist and art historian)