"Desert of the Mind" is one of the reduction woodcuts from Ruairi Fallon's year-long printmaking project Scattered Broken Maybe. This body of work was originally exhibited at Studio Red Arrow in HCMC, where Ruairi now lives and works. The piece is part of a series exploring the straddling of worlds-the nostalgic moments that almost make distant places feel like home.
The work touches on themes of nostalgia and the small connections between my home in Ireland and my new home in Vietnam. It's a dreamscape that straddles two worlds: the rain-strewn north-coast beach of Benone and the storms of South Vietnam-a process of collaging experiences on top of one another, like we do in our dreams.
The work is created using the reduction woodcut process, a printmaking technique that uses a single block to create multi-layered, multi-colour prints by progressively carving away material from the block for each colour layer. The artist first prints the lightest colour, then carves away the areas that were printed, re-inks the block, and prints the next colour on top. This method requires precise registration to align each new layer and is irreversible; the block is "reduced" with each pass, meaning the original surface can't be reprinted once it's carved away.