Flower Arrangements (Prints)
My printmaking practice from the past year has served as a way to process and archive the recent death of my father, a photographer, and in a sense these assemblages have become ephemeral reliquaries for him. Recurring images include flowers, which I view as gifts for both the living and the dead, and seeds, which are signs of both regeneration and nourishment. While the narrative behind a piece may be muddled by incomplete still life imagery and cut-up text, the organized, map-like structure of the composition hints that we’re en route to an answer. Within the many panels of each project are mark making styles that vary from blocky graphic shapes to scrawled line drawings made from memory; the overall picture plane, however, is held steady by a soft trompe-l’oeil rendering made through waterless lithography. By alternating drawing styles, scale, and color, the viewer flips through multiple modes of reading visual information, which creates an environment that is both puzzling and playful.
Reliquary for Dad, 2022. Waterless lithography and screenprint, 10x8 inches.
Buzzcut Study, 2022. Waterless lithography and screenprint, 6.5x4 inches.
Reconnecting with My Sense of Smell, 2021. Waterless lithography and screenprint, 6x4 inches.
Baby’s Breath and Cake for 2022, 2023. Waterless lithography and screenprint, 6x4 inches.
Flower Arrangement (Poppy/Seed), Waterless lithography and screenprint, 14x11 inches.
Flood Shift, 2022. Waterless lithography and screenprint, 10x8 inches.
Flower Arrangement (Awakening), Waterless lithography and screenprint, 8x10 inches. Printed with assistance from students at Iowa State University.
Dad’s Orange Chair, 2023. Waterless lithography and screenprint, 3x4 inches.
Seed Catalog
This modular assemblage project built off the more experimental Cartogram Studies (below) but identified a more cohesive color palette and technical approach. The work is primarily made with waterless lithography combined with screenprinting for color.
In these Seed Catalog compositions, I am exploring themes of growth, memory, and parenting through imagery culled from backyard gardens and the process of home preservation. Some images appear multiple times in a single composition, imitating the staggered, stammering effect of learning and remembering. There is a familiar, sentimental quality illustrated in these panels emphasized by their warm color palette.
Cartogram Studies
These experimental wall-mounted assemblages function as a multimedia sketching process that allows me to navigate themes of domesticity, repetition, and the recent death of my father. I draw and print in an intuitive matter, creating an ever-growing vocabulary of small and often simple works on paper: lithographic sketches of quiet objects and mournful flowers, screenprints of intense color and elusive text, and monotypes of winding black shapes. After accumulating this ephemeral material, I align and rearrange endless groupings of prints that yield unexpected compositions that pull the viewer beyond the meaning of an individual picture plane. These modular assemblages sprawl out like poetic maps, with a nod to the style of technical map known as a cartogram. Through the act of pinning disparate works to the wall, I am addressing each part with both physical tenderness and the objective resolve of a mapmaker.
