Artist’s Statement
Like my partner before them, the curators of this show chose this print called Prolapsed from among a selection of other prints made during the same two-week residency in Chicago at Spudnik Press with the help of Andy Rubin, formerly my boss at Tandem Press at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This selection process highlighted this work for me in a way that helps me see its strengths, appreciating it almost as though someone else made it. I had discounted this piece or seen it as simply one (and not necessarily a particularly good one) among many prints I had made while working in an extemporaneous fashion at a Vandercook SP25, making monoprints and pressure prints by layering impressions of relief blocks onto found musical scores and—as in the case here—unprinted Kitakata paper. It was not until I sent a photo of this piece to my partner, who responded so favorably from a distance of halfway across the country that I had to take another look. Similarly, upon first receiving the email informing me this print had been accepted despite my failure to submit a requested statement about the works I had submitted, I assumed the email was a mistake, reinforced by the fact the email stated the name of the piece that had been accepted, and it wasn’t a title I recognized or remembered assigning to any of my submitted prints… Upon reopening the email with which I had submitted work I recognized the logic in the title I assigned the piece, Prelapsed. I could wax on about how the imagery itself has a quality of cascading forms, circulating in a way that plenishes and replenishes itself, and by dint of this cyclical aspect inherently relates to balance. The time I spent at Spudnik making reductive relief prints and monoprints was in effect a kind of restoration of balance, coming as it did as an opportunity to work in earnest on prints, and in seeking to actually complete what I was setting out to do and take advantage of press access, acknowledging that to justify traveling so far to utilize printing presses when in fact I have year-round access to presses through my job, I needed there to be a compelling reason. Seeking assistance and what I learned later to describe as “body doubling,” led me to hire someone for whom I had worked at one time and whom I was now in a position to hire as my own printing assistant. This felt like coming full circle, while at the same time, reading the title in my emailed submission and appreciating it as though someone else had written it also felt like a restorative gesture, in that just as body doubling is a strategy helpful for individuals who—like myself—have ADHD, it was that very fact and how easily distractible I am, that led me to feel the need to hire someone to keep me on track and complete my intended project in the time allowed. Just as the title implies, I see myself as essentially predetermined to fail, i.e., “prelapsarian,” in that I begin so many projects that I fail to bring to completion, and yet the forms themselves as well as the overarching composition evoke a sense of that which can prolapse, i.e., a colon. The forms are outies, i.e., convex, and yet making an outie inherently generates an equal and opposite “innie,” or a form that could be used in pressure printing, or stratigraphically printing. This aspect of mining forms as stencils as well as matrices highlights the equal importance of what I may cut to highlight and what I cut away to reveal. I am continually grateful for the opportunity to reflect on my work thanks to an invitation from a curator or portfolio organizer to generate new work. This opportunity similarly has delivered, and thus itself represents a kind of balancing act in that the artist is both giving and receiving by sharing one’s work while also having it contextualized thoughtfully.