22½ x 30 inches | variable-edition silk screen print with hand coloring (colored ink and iridescent medium) on Arches 88 | 2008
There’s usually a time in my process when I no longer know what I’m doing. Every cut seems to be a mystery and a bit of a mistake. Having never used any pre-drawing or patterning in my practice, I allow the work to emerge through intuition, memory, and subconscious. I’m continually yielding to the unknown and allowing accidents to dissolve into the flow.
Now that I require outside vendors to fabricate portions of my work, I’ve become more intrigued with the evolution of abnormalities — how the original cut-paper drawings subtly transform after each generation loss. Having already established the multi-step process for fabricating work out of Plexiglas, I wanted to investigate the idea of “process” further.
With the help of grad students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, I fashioned silk screens using the computerized vector drawings from my previous Plexiglas pieces. Two screens printed identical overlapping mirror-images on the same sheet of paper, creating a new Rorschach-like ink-blot structure. Each mirrored shape morphed past its original form and receded into the atmosphere of the hand-colored iridescent paper.
Steering the process into print offered the original drawings an equilibrium that had eluded the three-dimensional Plexiglas counterpart. The smaller scale of the print triggers a more introverted response — perhaps the floating ink-blot-like forms provoke a repose toward one’s own psychological state. The procedural meandering that took me out of cut paper and into a computer format, then cut Plexiglas, and finally silk screen prints proved to be a highly intuitive and introspective evolution.