Printed Sculptures
The works presented here explore the idea of printed sculptures or conceptual objects and situations activated through print. I begin by creating small objects, usually created out of glass, wire, plaster, steel, and ice, and photographing them at a specific moment of their “lives.” Here, the whole objects are only seen in the silver gelatin prints I make. Beyond this point, only the images of those objects are used; the objects no longer exist. I am interested in the idea of understanding “what we are left with”; where the fragments, parts, or snapshots of what is left, act as a memory and function as the only ground to move forward with.
I cut, fragment, enlarge, and change the reality of those objects through the photography. I then manipulate and abstract that documentation through printmaking by minimizing and adding information related to the photographic documentation. Here, printmaking enters, allowing a period of fixating, honing in, and manipulation of the objects created.
In this work, I investigate the degrees of removal that take place from the actual object initially created, to the the new object created by hand mark-making, text, and layers of the printed image. Basic concepts of chemistry play a large role in this work; I take elementary concepts and terms in and out of context to apply them to the new printed documentation of these objects to explore how these imagined additions take on their own meaning in the human mind when paired with a photographic layer referencing a made object. The addition of labels, chemistry terms, and other atmospheric marks show the playful, experimental nature of these objects and how they could possibly function and react in the world.
In these printed sculptural and conceptual works on paper, I take the ‘realities’ I created into a representational imaginary; I understand this to be an altered state of what is existing; something based in reality but removed from it. This work is guided by imaginaries, but those that take place in the mind, with the the guidance of strong, simple mark-making, text, and photographic elements that can help transform one object, or idea, into another. By creating hypothetical objects, ideas, and scenarios, these works aim to emphasize material and process through the creation of sculptural objects, the life and death of the object, the transformation that printmaking allows, and the immortalizing, fixing nature of print on paper.