Watercourse I (2022)

Watercourse I (2022)
Barbara Hocker
Scroll in variant dragon scale binding. L152 cm (variable) x W12 cm. 64 panels. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 10 February 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Works evocative of water often invoke a sense of meditative stillness, but Barbara Hocker’s Watercourse I prompts a sense of meditative activity. You can’t stop moving it about. Or if you’re not moving it, you find yourself moving around it to contemplate it. It is the layering of watercolor, sumi ink, photographic prints with archival inks on washi paper, and the ancient Chinese method of bookbinding called dragon scale (sometimes called “whirlwind” or “fish scale” binding) that achieves this. Traditionally, the binding method involves a long scroll of paper to which successively shorter folios are attached at one end, often secured with a bamboo rod. Hocker has modified this structure by attaching folios of the same size with hinges to the underlying long scroll at intervals allowing one folio to overlap the next and so on. In each case, the effect of the overlapping folios creates the appearance of dragon scales.

Chinnery, 2007.

Each scale panel consists of a photographic print of details taken from photographs of rivers and lakes in Connecticut. The details were cropped to the size of a not-yet folded scale panel and printed on an Epson 7880 printer with archival K3 UltraChrome pigment inks. The paper is a two-layer machine-made Japanese washi with a surface of gampi fibers and a backing sulfite pulp. With the scale panel folded in the Chinese wrap-back fashion, the print covers both the interior and exterior of the scale. Look closely at the fore-edges, and you can see the water moving from one side of the curved panels to the other.

Painting water is painting light. Both fluctuate. In Watercourse I, a particular surface may occur across two or three adjacent scales, or it may be disrupted by one or more different surfaces randomly — just like light and shadows on ripples in a current.

Water and light have depth. Looking out over the surface of water, we detect the depth only if our gaze drops to look through the water. Then, whether we are seeing riverweed being pulled along beneath the surface or the reflection of light from the riverbed isn’t always clear. Hocker’s surfaces capture this flickering depth.

The dragon scale structure also leads to a fluctuation between surface and depth. The long panel to which the dragon scale panels are attached by watercolor-decorated kozo paper hinges is made of western style archival cotton art paper in shorter segments glued together. On both sides, it is all surface of watercolor and sumi ink.

When arranged on its bottom edge and viewed from above, the scroll’s undulating shape and the shadowed interiors of the scales project motion and depth.

Watercourse I is wordless. If Gaston Bachelard had had the chance to “read” it, he would have required another chapter in his Water and Dreams to explain how the non-verbal material imagination achieves what it achieves. For him, it was about the imagination’s expression of matter through words. With Barbara Hocker, imagination expresses the restless matter of water with paint, paper, and inventive bookbinding.

Further Reading

“Nif Hodgson“. 28 October 2021.

“Helen Malone“. 23 July 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony“. 14 February 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Rutherford Witthus“. 28 October 2021. Books On Books Collection.

“Zhang Xiaodong“. 7 August 2025. Books On Books Collection.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1983. Water and Dreams : An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

Blair, Russell. 28 November 2022. “Barbara Hocker explores waterfalls in ‘Ebb & Flow’ on ArtWalk at Hartford Public Library“. HPL Blogs. Accessed 3 August 2023.

Ciprus, Laurencia. July 2023. “Barbara Hocker’s Meditative Media“. Ink Magazine. 18:210, 36-43. Westbrook, CT. Accessed 3 August 2025.