Sharon Kaitz: Dancing on the Edge

As a child, the best part of playing Hopscotch for me was the first white chalk line that I set down on the asphalt in front of my home. The game has been with us for three hundred years, its name derives from two activities, to hop which everyone knows means to jump, and to scotch, which means to cut or scratch a line in the dirt. That line has followed me throughout my life as a painter. I am always, in one way or another, scratching lines in the dirt, whether making marks on canvas, burlap, linen, clay or in the earth itself. My painted lines are conduits of connection both from past to present and across geographic spaces: they are passages, threads, trails, footprints. As with hopscotch there is a journey out and a return journey where the numbers are upside down and messages are scrambled. The squares contain the story like the edges of a canvas but sometimes the line is blurred, the flung stone misses its mark, breaks free from the borders drawn to contain it, as if to call into question the legitimacy of borders themselves by revealing their arbitrary nature. In my paintings, fabric, color and shape express a desire for unbounded harmony, but desire is always caught by the tail, the lines must be drawn.