ShePeril (Work in Progress)
My current work is a reflection of my experience living as a person with diminishing rights. From as early as the second grade, even though I was always a top scorer on any given test, I observed that my male counterpoint in class was given extra work to steer him toward college as I was relegated to assisting others to learn how to read. The rationale being that I was likely to “ just grow up and have babies”. I always tried to see what he was working on over his shoulder and work it out for myself. (He became a nuclear engineer).
The election of 2016 has brought all these memories to the forefront of my formerly abstract painting practice as I struggle to reconcile how I am seen as somehow less than a capable/whole person and wonder what might have been had I been afforded the same expectations for my abilities.
For me, the imagery in ShePeril conjures up a view of female form as consisting of hips and reproductive parts with partial heads (lacking a full brain), in other words how I believe I have been seen by others since a very young age. The stripes or bars are the idea of being trapped in this idea of what I am supposed to amount to according to others.
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Process
In an improvised transfer process, I print my screens onto a polycarbonate monoprint plate with oil based inks, then run the plates through a press to print onto dampened paper. The linear objects start as vector based drawings that I expose onto a screen and print in the same transfer manner. For the ShePeril series I learned Mokulito (wood lithography) because the resulting (though unpredictable) wood grain textures seem highly appropriate to this imagery. For this series I also learned copper plate photo-etching. I have done a small edition of a four plate, five color image and many variations that screen print onto a wiped plate and/or add a surface roll in a transparent color.
