talus integuments
This body of work, created at Pele Prints in the summer of 2016, aims to create cavernous spaces, layers of transparency building to obscurity, and moments of clarity formed within darkness. As with previous work, these prints relate to both the body and the landscape, and can be seen as either macroscopic visions or microscopic inspections. With these prints, I maintain some of the ethereal wonder in quiet, ghosted remnants of texture, while adding solidity through monolithic forms.
Talus refers to cave structures that are built up by accumulation of debris, while an integument refers to a skin, shell, or rind. Both these systems are evident in the concept, and in the formal making of the prints: some are created through copious “drops” of inked fabric building up the surface, and others through thin relief rolls, with permeable gaps. As I navigate the intersecting roles of my life as an artist, teacher, mother, wife, and friend, and as I try to make sense of the lately baffling, and often chaotic world, I consider these layers that make a whole. This work turns these considerations into physical spaces, where accumulation of dreams/worries/hopes/fears become shelters, caverns, hollows and perforations; depth and density is created through overlays of information, and light is found within the dark.