Without Cease the Earth Faintly Trembles 1988

A play of flat surface and sculptural elements, as seen in this work, bears witness to the desire felt by Betty Goodwin to continually push her medium toward an ever more palpable physical and psychological presence. By the mid-1980s, she was concentrating on making large drawings and grappling to find more materially present and direct means of expression. The objects she collected in her studio provided inspiration; among them were pieces of rough scrap metal and steel bars that attracted her for their immutable qualities of strength and inflexibility. She began to find ways to incorporate these unlikely elements in drawings, where the harsh solidity of steel served to emphasize her characteristically tentative repetition of lines, an accumulation of gestures from which a sense of the body’s vulnerability emerges. Goodwin considered such objects to be forms of energy that she could integrate into the act of drawing to surpass the limits of two-dimensional graphic depiction.

A thin steel rod is suspended at the centre of Without Cease the Earth Faintly Trembles, typical of Goodwin’s attempts to address themes of torture and confinement by giving irrefutable form to brutality. She was an avid watcher of the nightly news and amassed newspaper and magazine clippings of current events, including worldwide political struggles, such as the civil war in El Salvador (October 1979–January 1992). Still, the scenes in those photographic images to which she exposed herself were less sources for her drawings than was her impetus to internalize their meaning and exorcise their effect.

The title, which appears in Goodwin’s 1987 notebook as an unattributed quotation, implies an unrelenting subliminal destabilization or threat.  The figure appears to have its arms bound, incapable of shielding itself from blows, while a wide bar drawn across the neck obscures the face, separating metaphorically the head from the body. The steel rod integrated into the middle of the composition is accentuated by drawn lines indicating a field of movement around the figure or vibration and suggesting the constant presence of harm beside a defenceless body. In this work and related drawings such as Figure Lying on a Bench, 1987, Goodwin points to the insufficiency of realistic depictions to fully embody the gravity of events. Rather than offering a cohesive narrative, she expresses excesses in a meeting of solid three-dimensional steel and the transparent surface on which the figure hovers delicately. Without Cease the Earth Faintly Trembles bears witness to Goodwin’s desire to force the medium of drawing beyond its mute descriptive capacity.