ABOUT MONOPRINTS

A print, but only once.

Unlike an editioned print, a monoprint is a singular work. Ink is applied to plate, transferred to paper through the press and altered through each successive layer. Drawing, painting, collage and other printed elements may be added but the finished work cannot be precisely repeated.

That unpredictability is what draws me to the process.

I often begin with something observed in nature – a botanical form, a wing, water, a fragment of landscape — but I am not trying simply to reproduce what I see. I am interested in what lies beneath initial appearances: repitition and variation, movement and stillness, solitude and relationship.

Printmaking allows these ideas to accumulate in layers. A form can be repeated without remaining the same. One image can obscure another while allowing traces of what came before to remain visible.The final image develops through an exchange between intention, material, pressure, accident and response.

This is why I have been drawn to monoprinting. It resists a single fixed point of view. Rather than constructing an image around one linear perspective, I can allow several moments of seeing to co-exist on the same surface. 

For me, monoprinting is both a process and a way of seeing. Each layer records a moment of observation, discovery and change.

The finished work is and invitation to look — and to discover what you see!