Writing-on-Stone IV, V

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Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone IV
archival inkjet and collagraph
76.2 x 50.6 cm.

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Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone V
archival inkjet and collagraph
76.2 x 50.6 cm.

Here are two more of the Writing-on-Stone pieces from the Silent Messengers series.

For more information and to view the others, see Writing-on-Stone I and II and Writing-on-Stone III.
All of the Silent Messenger series may of course also be accessed at the link on the left under PRINTWORKS.

UPDATE summer 2012: My new GALLERY is up and running, please visit my works there!

maquettry

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Dancing Owl-Woman
recycled printmaking elements

Please visit a most wonderful, magical and unique collection of maquettes by a diverse group of artists presented as a five-part online exhibition by Clive Hicks-Jenkins on his Artlog!

I am so pleased to be included at almost the last minute in part five. Go see!

Do visit part one, part two, part three, part four. Thank you, Clive!

Here’s my earlier post about my sudden inspiration to try making a maquette for the first time and the encouraging comments to join the maquette exhibition, especially from Clive.

I like that Clive calls this my ‘owl-woman resurrection’. That’s because I cut up (‘cannibalised’ is the word Clive used) prints that were proofs from ARKEO #4 and Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone I.

Here’s also a post about the making of the trial proofs for the latter piece, should you be interested.

Writing-on-Stone series

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Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone I
archival inkjet and collagraph
76.2 x 50.6 cm.

As reorganization in the studio continues, I realize I also need to do some here on the blog. With the redesign at the end of January, I lost the gallery/slide show (though some stray links to it here and there seem to work and bring it up on the old site). I am eagerly anticipating a replacement whenever my too-busy-with-work family members can manage it.

In the meantime, when revisiting some of my Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone series here, I noticed only Writing-on-Stone III appears along with the announcement for the “gallery” and the others are only viewable in the latter.

So I am placing them right on the main blog where the links will find them directly. I hope you will enjoy revisiting them or, if new here, viewing them for the first time as they are works from 2007 (seems like almost yesterday!). Above is the first one, and below is the second in the series. Numbers four and five will be posted later.

Here is some background information about Writing on Stone Park in Alberta and our visit there which inspired these works.

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Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone II
archival inkjet and collagraph
76.2 x 50.6 cm.

Please visit my post about the making of the trial proofs for Writing-on-Stone I.

UPDATE: Please view also Writing-on-Stone IV and V

UPDATE 2, much later: The new GALLERY is up (see link on the top left here) and the works may now be viewed there under their series name, though not all the work has been uploaded yet – another work in progress.

my ‘gallery’

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Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone III
archival inkjet and collagraph
76.2 x 50.6 cm.

I’m excited and happy to announce my slide show gallery** of print works is finally online. I believe it makes viewing my work much easier and more pleasant than clicking on the individual entries in the blog archives. I hope you agree! Long time readers may have already seen most of my work, except for the last five pieces in the Silent Messengers series. Subtitled Writing-on-Stone, they appear in the beginning of the slide show.

I’ll be adding lots more selections from the older series, so please check back again from time to time. The ‘gallery’ link is up on the top left area of this blog.** As for the current print series I’m working on, I’ll announce when I have some of them installed.

Being quite hopeless with web geekery, I’m hugely grateful to my graphic-designer-daughter Erika for researching different options and finding an easy presentation program to incorporate into the blog, then setting this ‘gallery’ up for me so that all I do is upload the images and information to it.

Related: This work was featured in qarrtsiluni.

**Update May 3, 2012: the ‘gallery’ link has been removed. Work is in progress on a new one…
UPDATE AGAIN much later: the link above now goes to the latest brand new gallery, and you can find it also at the top of the left bar on this site – enjoy!

Assemblage X

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Silent Messengers: Assemblage X

Collagraph on paper and archival inkjet on mylar layers
Layers attached together at top edge
A unique assembled print
28.5 x 35 cm.

Assemblage IX

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Silent Messengers: Assemblage IX

Collagraph on paper and archival inkjet on mylar layer
Layers attached together at top edge
A unique assembled print
35 x 28.5 cm.

Assemblage VIII

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Silent Messengers: Assemblage VIII

Collagraph on paper and archival inkjet on mylar layer
Layers attached together at top edge
A unique assembled print
35.5 x 28.5 cm.

Assemblage VII

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Silent Messengers: Assemblage VII

Collagraph on paper and archival inkjet on mylar layer
(Layers attached together at top edge)
A unique assembled print
35.5 x 28.5 cm.

Assemblage VI

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Silent Messengers: Assemblage VI

Collagraph on paper and archival inkjet on mylar layer
(Layers attached together at top edge)
A unique assembled print
35 x 28.5 cm.

a collaboration

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Connecting with D’Amico #2

Yippee! Our collaborative project In Its Four Voices – Silent Messengers: Connecting with D’Amico #2 has been published on Qarrtsiluni, the online literary and visual art zine! Go see and LISTEN to it! Then come back….

I must tell you the story behind this international collaboration. First about the image. Artist Karen D’Amico** of London, UK, and I met and corresponded through our respective artist blogs. She mailed me about a dozen close-up photographs of rocks that she had taken, and offered these to use in my work as I wished. I chose five of them to create the prints called Silent Messengers: Connecting with D’Amico #1-5. Thus it became ‘a borderless collaboration of sorts’, as Karen commented.

Sometime earlier this year, blog friend and prolific writer and poet Tom Montag of Wisconsin, USA, expressed an interest in writing a poem inspired by one of my Silent Messenger pieces. Tom wrote a fairly long and thrilling piece based on his choice, Connecting with D’Amico #2.

I am still astounded and awed that my work inspired this. In turn, I felt excited and inspired to find a way to make this into some kind of performance piece. With no experience in this and with the three of us in three different countries, a voice recording seemed the best possibility.

Around the same time Qarrtsiluni’s editors decided that the theme for March and April would be Ekphrasis – ‘poetry in dialogue with visual art’. Perfect…. except for the restriction to far fewer lines than Tom’s poem has. We checked with the editors to see if they would consider an audio file. Yes, they replied and so, we pushed on.

I roped in my clever daughter Erika who had some experience with digital music recording. The challenge was to find four readers and capture their voices into one recording. My husband got drawn into this, a bit reluctantly, heh, to read the first voice. As Karen was too busy to participate at this time, Erika took her place as the second voice. And I read the third voice, that of the artist/marker, of course. Recording our voices here at home was physically easy enough, but Tom is in Wisconsin, you know. After a few trials, the best recording of Tom’s reading of the fourth voice was over his phone into our computer with the aid of some special software and Skype (thanks to my husband’s expertise here). Then Erika did all the intricate editing work on all the voices using Apple’s Garage Band, not exactly the most professional program but giving us reasonably good results we think.

As Tom said, this is ‘a collaboration of a collaboration across three countries and three media’. This project has been an exciting new venture for me, and for all of us, and I’m so thrilled with it. A huge thank you to Tom for the fabulous poem and his reading, to Karen again for the photos that inspired my work, to my husband for his voice and technical help, and to Erika for her voice, advice and skillful editing work! And a big thank you to all the editors of Qarrtsiluni for their excellent editing suggestions and for publishing this.

We hope you like it…
(Tom is away on vacation right now, but I hope he will write a few words about his poem on his blog when he gets back. I’ll update with the link here when it happens.)

** Reedited March 15th, 2013 during a blog tidy-up: Karen has not been at this blog address for some years, so link has been removed. I have now quite accidentally found her new eponymous website: Karen Ay