Wounded

Heyman's 2010 etching is a small-format intaglio print whose title and date place it in proximity to the artist's testimony work — the Amman and Istanbul Portfolios on Abu Ghraib survivors had been completed shortly before, and the period was occupied with related portraits of U.S. military sexual assault survivors and other vulnerable subjects. As a single-technique etching, the print is line-based rather than tonal, the figure described through hatching and contour. The economy of the medium — copper plate, acid bite, single inking — suits a subject rendered with restraint. Where the larger portfolio prints embed handwritten testimony around the figure, this work operates on the image alone, leaving the wound itself to do the work of address. Within Heyman's wider practice, Wounded sits in a strand of single-figure studies that stand outside named-portrait series, registering harm in a generalized rather than specific form. The etched line carries the body's mark with the clinical exactitude particular to the medium.