Artist, Kenturah Davis: I thought, what if I can make an image entirely by writing?
Narrator: That’s Kenturah Davis, the artist who made this work.
Kenturah Davis: This is an image that is made by embossing, where you use pressure to push the text into the paper. After I do that, I take a pencil and rub that material. The black becomes a tool that reveals this text that's embedded. And then I can just freehand draw on top of that.
Narrator: Davis drew the figure from a photograph.
Kenturah Davis: An important part of my process is the photographs that I make to make the drawings. This is a long exposure—the lens of the camera stays open— so any movement that the figure makes is captured in the image. And so you see the blur of her hair and of her arm.
In some areas, you can read the text. In other areas, it's so layered that you almost can't read it. That's a poetic representation of the fact that we're always receiving information, and some of it sits at the surface, but some of it becomes deeply embedded in our memory.