New Art

Posting on this blog has been pretty sporadic lately, and will probably continue to be until I complete my MFA in May. It's been a really wonderful and surprising journey. Last semester I had the opportunity to take a grad-level printmaking course. It was challenging and exciting and I'm pretty amazed by the turns I took aesthetically and the new possibilities that opened up by working more abstractly. So I thought I'd share some of that progress with you here. I hope you enjoy! No titles yet but I'm thinking of calling the series "The Smallest Things I Could Say." The medium varies somewhat from print to print, but largely they employ the use of collograph, trace monotype, stenciling, sewing, and selective waxing.

Just for some insight, here is my artist statement:

Scuffed lines, noise etched in a copper plate, a ghost print--they whisper, murmur. I am interested in the space between two entitities: the unsaid, the barely said, and sometimes, the shouted. These conversations manifest themselves through linear or circular forms, delicate shapes that seem to enact their own noise, poised to interact with, or speak to, one another.

Influenced by the work of artists like Diana Behl and Lydia Dymer, whose marks create a personal language to be catalogued, I have been inspired to depart from more figurative elements and to develop my own vocabulary. Composing marks similar to the way I use language when I write poems, individual elements combine to create their own syntax. I have also explored the subtle incorporation of text at times to add to the conversation--an additional voice to respond to what is already present. The viewer can take away moments, traces of what once was, the marking of time.

This is a new venture and my catalog is small, but it builds amid the chatter of small shapes cut out of paper, incised in copper, drawn on the back of kitakata, the remaining ink pressed into the surface of a clean sheet of paper. Sometimes the conversations go unfinished, words trail off or are left unspoken, but the prints amass like a tome of letters that speak of their own history.
















This one is really large for me. About 19" wide and a couple or a few feet long. (Can you tell I am not big on measurements?)



These small circular pieces were really fun to make and they are completely different to encounter in person than on a computer screen. I like making use of the multiple and the possibility to sift through these and experience the varying textures. I haven't arrived a good solution for display yet.