Malémé
Selected Works
What is Scratchboard?
Practice
Scratchboard is a black-inked clay surface I don’t draw on so much as excavate.
Instead of adding pigment, I remove it, scratching away ink stroke by stroke to reveal the bright white clay beneath. A single piece can take hundreds of hours: thousands of tiny incisions, built up slowly, until an image emerges from what looked, at first, like nothing but black.
That slowness is what gives scratchboard its power: sharper contrast, finer detail, light that feels genuinely pulled out of the dark rather than painted onto it. I love this process because it demands total presence. Watching an image appear stroke by stroke still feels like magic to me, and that’s the beauty I try to put into every piece, not just what it shows, but the care it took to bring it out of the dark.