Daniel Lehan

from RSPB Book of Garden Birds Erasure

Artist’s Statement:

RSPB Book of Garden Birds, Bennett, Linda, Published by Hamlyn, 1978
Re-titled RSPB Book of Garden Birds Erasure
40 pages of text erasures and 12 erasures of bird illustrations. 
November 2022

The erasures are made by removing words, and consequently much of the page, using scalpel blades, rather than painting out, or highlighting words. 

The use of scalpel blades developed from - PAGES DESTROYED BY A TYPEWRITER - a series of texts which employed using a typewriter with no ribbon, the metal keys damaging / destroying the text and even the paper, if frail.

I particularly like the physical process of altering a text, the act of creating a new text dependant on imagination AND physical work.  

When using scalpel blades, the removal of words and paper might be regarded as sacrilegious - physically attacking a work of literature - and yet from this alteration something new is revealed. I am struck by how a destroyed page or book, has a frailty, often a beauty, a beauty having survived some form of ‘creative’ attack. 

A consequence of removing text, is the increase in the amount of ‘empty’ space around any text remaining. This removal, feels to me like an ‘opening up’ the space akin to light in a painting, a space for the eye to consider these ‘floating’ words ( no longer held in sequential order) differently. 

Working with erasures, I am taken with the idea and process of absence, the absence of something that was. The removal of words, an act of reduction, is intriguing and unpredictable - who knows, what sense will, or can be made of, a text. What direction will the words on the page lead the imagination?

Everyone Must

an image of an erasure poem made by removing parts of the page with a razor blade, the page shows through to a black background and is thin and ragged at the edges where paper has been removed

In Legend

an image of an erasure poem made by removing parts of the page with a razor blade, the page shows through to a black background and is thin and ragged at the edges where paper has been removed

The Dispute

an image of an erasure poem made by removing parts of the page with a razor blade, the page shows through to a black background and is thin and ragged at the edges where paper has been removed

Daniel Lehan studied Fine Art at Winchester School of Art, England, and later studied Art Therapy at Goldsmiths College, London. He has lived in New York, Florence, Finland, and Quebec, and now lives in Dungeness, Kent, facing the English Channel. Each day, since 2015, he has kept DAY PAGES, a typewritten collaged diary. His work has been published in various Small Press publications, and is included in The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in The 21st Century, published by Hayward Publishing. Here is the link to a film he made about collage and his work ~ www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7icVyFjaP0