Screenprints

Artist’s Statement

I never would have considered myself a religious person. I grew up very disconnected from any kind of belief and developed a sort of angst against it conceptually for a variety of reasons that anyone familiar with the church may find glaringly obvious.

These past couple of years however, I’ve been thinking a lot about our place in the universe; the connections between us and the Earth and all of the life that inhabits it. I’m fascinated by the way that our energy comes from the billions of years of life before us and returns to the soil to be redistributed once more, placing us in the middle of a miraculous constantly cycling system that could very well never happen again. I still have my gripes with institutions of faith, and the edgy visuals I embrace are absolutely in some way a protest of the ideals that they uphold, but I've grown to greatly appreciate the way that faith or more accurately to myself, spirituality, can make room for people to improve themselves. Embracing the beauty of decomposition as a process of transfer of life has become a large theme of my work.

This particular series is five close-ups of bugs that recycle organic matter in a variety of ecosystems: Earthworms, millipedes, maggots, woodlice, and cockroaches. All of them feature the creatures in piles, not just visually connected to each other but overlapping, jumbled, messy. Bugs are fighting their finite life span, trying to make it, seeking comfort – a tale all too familiar to us.

All five serigraphs are eight by eight inches on ten by eleven inch sheets of paper, with the extra inch on the bottom in an attempt to mimic Polaroid photos and aid the parallels between the bugs and humanity. Each is a three color print, using a light gray, dark gray, and black on top of the white sheets to create a faux four color monochromatic image. All transparencies were hand drawn, staying close to reference for legibility but embracing the shakiness and inaccuracies of the human hand. Images were further distressed throughout the screen printing process, allowing the marks of oil marker where my transparency wasn't dark enough and holes in the emulsion on my screen into my final prints.

From afar, they look like photos. As you get closer and begin to examine the prints, you see the layers, the lines, the dots, the chunky blocks of color. By vast margin, the transparencies were the longest part of this process. I was very dedicated to treating these creatures with respect and capturing their likenesses.

Overall, this project was very therapeutic for me. An outlet for real passion aside from my career, a source of stability amidst life changes and a quickly evolving and ultimately terrifying world. Printmaking will always hold a very dear place in my heart and I'm ecstatic to do more of it as soon as I can.