What It Becomes

Made from ink, paper, and his own saliva, Untitled exemplifies Jim Hodges’s deeply intimate relationship to drawing. “It always starts inside my body,” he has said, “and I use drawing as a way of getting it out.” Hodges created this constellation of flowers, spiderwebs, and other motifs in his work by drawing them individually on small scraps of paper, which he then licked, placed face-down on a larger sheet, and rubbed to transfer their designs. While the use of saliva alludes to the politics and fear around kissing during the height of the AIDS epidemic, it also draws on the artist’s childhood memories of activating the temporary tattoos inside packages of bubble gum by wetting the paper candy wrapper or his skin. Made from water-based inks, Hodges’s own drawings ran and bled when dampened, their edges loosening and blurring into one another to create a “wildness, out-of-controlness” that the artist welcomes in his work.