My experience of Moorish arches in Andalusia led to the series, Andalus. The bright Spanish sun burns the color and the depth right out of the surface, leaving these arches as abstract forms to play with. It's as if the sun bleached the Moors and their culture out of the landscape, and left these shells, filled with ochre tones, purple shadows, and hidden secrets.

For this series I dyed Kozo pulp, prepared using traditional Japanese technique, and poured it into a Western mold, using templates for the shapes. Sheets were sun-dried, after which I "pulled out' the images and enriched them with colored pencils and gold-leaf.

Poured paper conveys the fluidity of culture. You can see the different layers, the Roman pillars, the Visigothic horseshoe arch, the Moorish lines, all flowing into each other and at the same time crumbling and fading, following their builders back into these dark mouths of time. Paper communicates the fragile nature of civilization; still, there's something enduring, something haunting about these colors and shapes, like an image left on the retina after seeing the bright days of Andalus.

The tension of surface/image/light captures the spirit of the space.

- Gayle Fitzpatrick