My work is influenced by the Victorian Romantic sensibility, and the idea of Victorian womanhood as expressed in the pseudo-sciences of that period. Phrenology, spiritualism, utopianism, mental healing, mesmerism, table-rapping –all of these flourished during the nineteenth century at a time when the industrial/scientific philosophy became the dominate world view. The fact that these so-called fringe movements were led by women is not lost on me; the women in my drawings act as conduits to this shadow world. I consider them characters playing out their roles in an alternative reality, a reality which is still available to all of us if we open our imaginations in the truest romantic sense.

My background is in history and literature; I worked for years as a librarian and am an avid collector of books and ephemera from the nineteenth century occult. Most of the paper in my drawings comes from ledgers or letters or diaries culled from my collections. I feel much more at home working on papers that contain traces of the past. In this current series, I use the simplest of media –a pencil– to create veils of intricate patterns and decoration. I also make use of simple formal devices such as borders and captions to mimic Victorian illustration. I consider my small drawings as pages loosed from a long, dreamy novel, and my hope is that the reader, or viewer, will catch glimpses of this odd narrative, and want to read on.

– Roz Leibowitz