11/28/2011
Before being exposed to the art of printmaking in college, my work leaned heavily towards painting and mixed media. After practicing the process-oriented techniques involved in printmaking, I find it hard to make work in any medium without finding ways to incorporate them. I was using handmade
and traditional techniques in the prints that I began creating, but the doilies that I started experimenting with were mass produced paper cut outs. They were a material mimicry of the original that imitated the forgotten forms of Victorian ornamentation. Placed under dishes and trays as an ornament, the doily set the tone of upper middle class Victorian homes. Originally, I wanted to explore the possibilities of the negative space these forms could make. Since doilies were used to prevent the trace of something being left behind, I wanted to see the trace they themselves would leave if the roles were reversed. Although the doily is an archetype of femininity, it invokes in each of us something different; thoughts of grandmothers, Victorian sensibilities, or valentines. Taking away the standard representation can reveal the simplicity of the form and the beauty in the balance of absence and addition. In this vein of thinking, and because I lost access to the print shop a couple of months after graduation, I needed to explore a simpler version of printmaking. By layering hand cut stencils, found objects, graphite drawings, and paper doilies I have recently begun to see results similar to the mono-printing that I initially fell in love with. The aesthetic beauty and richness you can produce in a printshop is hard to duplicate without being in a printshop, although the exploration of these simpler techniques was critical to the progression of my thought process concerning this body of work.
