Mark Roller
My work consists almost entirely of an on-going, "serial portrait" of my wife Colette Crutcher. I began this project over 25 years ago when Colette was pregnant with our first child, and I wanted to record the physical and emotional changes she was undergoing. Gradually I realized that this single focus on another person as subject had potential beyond the immediate circumstances of Colette's pregnancy. I became intrigued with, or perhaps obsessed by, the possibility of depicting Colette as a whole person, through a multiplicity of images made over time; time being the dimension that is absent from a single portrait image. Rather than dealing primarily with the biographical facts of her life, I want instead to convey her subjective experience, through the medium of her body, the outward expression of her inner self. However, a portrait is, by definition, one person interpreting another person, scrutinizing from the outside an ever receding mystery, one which even in an entirely open hearted person like Colette, plays a teasing game of hide and seek. So the results of my efforts are always uncertain and provisional, full of gaps which I fill in with my own materials, making my portrait a kind of self-portrait. In the end, what I have created is a kind of hybrid entity combining elements of both me and Colette. My hope is that the viewer, who doesn't know either of us, comes away from my work with a sense of a powerful human presence, which is as good a way as any of describing my subjective experience of Colette in my life.
