Artist Statement
These hand colored etchings come out of a strong desire to integrate the mediums of print, photography and drawing. The matrix of the plate is made up primarily of my own photographs and various appropriated, drawn, painted or traced imagery from many sources. I find rich ground in the combining of daily
objects with historically significant signs and symbols; from a wind up chicken, grain pollen and bugs wings to early cave drawings of comets, petroglyphs and pictograms to phrenology’s search for personality on the bumps of a person’s scull.
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This latest series of prints (from 2000-2009) is inspired by many years of road trips that my husband and I have taken mostly throughout the southwest, Texas and the Mississippi river area, the hunt for images along the less used highways, back roads and semi-forgotton towns is often useful material, matching the symbolic landscape of dreams and the recollection of our past.
I find myself drawn towards this kind of imagery. Revisiting these deserted objects and signs each fall and spring in our camper with our cameras has become a ritual full of anticipation, meaning and pleasure. We get away from the familiar and sometimes the mode of seeing opens.
Like the experience of finding a hundred and two year old water tower in Hachita, New Mexico with little remnants of a town and an old women with a walking stick in which she waves and shakes with some authority. She comes seemingly out of nowhere to tell the history of the tower and to beware of bandits and snakes.
Or the discovery of the Salton Sea, just outside of Palm Springs, which was once a thriving destination for recreation and nightlife, but through the years, because of flooding and enviromental problems has become an abandoned shell. And now it carries another kind of attraction, calm and ghostlike.
And further along the shore there is Bombay Beach, which flooded in the seventies, leaving behind half sunken RVs, TVs, and a perfectly placed Lazy Boy.
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Or the strange sight of lines of dying palm trees creating a kind of oasis, old gas stations, tall fading announcements of food and lodging, and of course the variety of hunks of rusted metal, the frames of yesterday’s vehicles, all leftover signs of human presence.
In putting a print together I take these images and experiences that I’ve gathered and layout a composition that reminds and signifies the symbolic and dreamlike aspects of the movement of life. I like the combination of graphic imagery with aspects of memory and reflection, objects floating and related, bound by color, oil and painted imagery.
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