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03 December 2011

Relief Prints, or When The Stories Come Too Quickly For Stitching

Memory and loss, origin and transformation: I meditate on these questions when stitching, working slowly, intuitively, and without a fixed plan. The piece tells me what to do next, and, the result is more like a poem than a narrative. But sometimes the story is everything; I feel driven to show you something specific, to explain this world, or to create a new one. It's an urgent need that cannot wait for stitching to make it tangible. And that is when I pick up my fine gouge and a piece of linoleum and give myself over to the pleasure of carving.

One Of Us Is Dreaming

A relief print is both story and image. It depends equally on what is cut away and what remains; the ink simultaneously tells the story of those choices and reveals an image.

Buckling

We tell stories all the time, to ourselves and to others. We conjure and recollect. We edit, we embellish, we illustrate, and sometimes we say more than we meant to or less than we'd hoped.

On/In/Over

Along with the print Aleksandr Kowalski Never Forgot His Chicken and the second-generation snutki Temporary Bodies, On/In/Over is currently in the exhibit Open Space: Art About the Land, a touring show sponsored by the Red-Tail Conservancy. It received a Purchase Award.