My Broken Bathroom
Behind the Board
Back
After being subjected to looking at chalk for nine years of his early education, Dylan Chan reapproaches this combo years later, where the dusty and fragile organic meets the clean and durable industrial, to explore what lies behind the two. After various experiments, he finds himself grinding chalk sticks with water and dripping them onto wood over hundreds of hours, akin to the geological formation of the material. His meditative approach to form giving via simple and automatic actions ‘grows’ chalk from simple cylinders into complex, morphing structures, a glow-up he pairs with three-dimensional blackboard forms generated using the I ching (the book of changes), an ancient Chinese divination text, to adapt the board to these new forms of chalk. The new combination of chalk and blackboard taps into what lies behind the realm of mathematics and physics, a secret garden where the two lovers meet again to reveal their overlooked sensitivities.