Dewdrop Reflex

22 ½ 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 more through intuition, memory and my subconscious. I’m continually yielding to the unknown and allowing accidents to dissolve into the flow.

Now that I require the help of outside vendors to fabricate portions of my work, I’ve become more intrigued with the evolution of abnormalities. Specifically, how the original cut-paper drawings will subtly transform after each generation loss. Having already established the multi-step process for fabricating my 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 for my previous Plexiglas pieces. Two screens were used to print identical overlapping, mirror-images on the same sheet of paper. This created a new Rorschach-like, ink-blot structure. Each mirrored shape morphed past its original form and also receded into the atmosphere of the hand-colored iridescent paper.

Steering the process into the printed form offered the original drawings an equilibrium that eluded its three-dimensional Plexiglas counterpart. The balance of the mirrored amalgamation became more solid within its newly found stasis. The smaller scale of the print triggers a more introverted response; perhaps the floating ink-blot-like forms provoke a repose to one’s own psychological state? In any case, 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.