FINE-ART PRINTS (continued)

Mary writes:

"As an artist, I am drawn to the ever-changing drama of paper and ink. In a marbling tank, the ink kisses the paper. In sumi-e painting, the ink attacks. In bookmaking, the two dance together to conjure ideas and meanings. In intaglio printing, they implode like lovers. The mighty power of the etching press tests them (and tests the artist), calling out strengths, weaknesses, character.

"My view is that an artist’s allegiance must be to the materials, mediums and methods she works with. Art is like a walkabout in a vast country—slowly finding the truths of this paper, that ink and how they give birth—in an intimate, endless experiment with life.

"For centuries in Asia, brush painters created images of bamboo, plum blossoms, birds, sages, mountains, and other elements of their world. This iconography was used not to make 'art' in today’s sense but as recurring material for meditative practice, spiritual instruction and even political statements. But I have no interest in bamboo or other borrowings, and we have no comparable iconography suited to today’s world. That is why I am working to discover a new iconography—elements of our era whose appearance, structure, meanings, and interrelationships embody key aspects of the modern outlook and conceptual repertoire.

"One such aspect, surely, is science. My print series Meiosis [shown in the prints gallery] makes use of cell division—a fundamental process in nature first discovered by science—as recurring material for brush paintings, monotypes, and etchings based on brush work or photos. Cell division is proceeding around us, and inside us, at a fantastic volume and pace with every breath we take. It is simple, clear, and beautiful. But it is also deeply complex and mysterious.

"Cells are keyplaceholders in our habitual belief that the world is built up in a hierarchy of nested parts and wholes. Yet they also call into question these complacencies: Which level (if any) of reality is 'real'—the one we live on, the one we see in microscopes, or (even deeper down) the one particle physicists dream of? And what are we, really, from moment to moment—when our cells divide like water and become their own children?"

Mary teaches in the Continuing Education Department at Maine College of Art and served until recently as co-president of Peregrine Press, a noted printmakers’ cooperative in Portland, Maine.

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