Artist Statement
5 copper-plate photogravure prints with letterpress and gold leaf — 1998
This suite began with simple head & shoulder portraits of ratty or badly executed amateur taxidermists’ mounts. These puzzled, angry, quizzical, funny creatures were the raw material for a body of work which examined the frozen state of long-dead animals, now verging on the comic rather than the macabre. This project also provided the potential for the fabrication of hard-to-find animals using pieces of beach detritus and actual animal artifacts (skulls, hides, etc.), and mixed-media assemblage techniques. The creature created and depicted this way (Upupa) does not try to hide the artifice or falseness of its construct.
Various sources from Celtic illumination and decoration to Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts have provided the framework for these prints. Translations from the Latin texts of 13th C. I edited medieval bestiaries, which describe common, exotic, and mythical creatures with allegorical and sometimes humorous overtones, to accompany my personal iconography of animal remains and newly re-constructed animal forms. The moralizing allegories and anthropomorphic treatment of these animals and their behavior are the crux of my interest in these texts. These tales and misinterpretations can surprise us in their naïveté, while often alluding to actual fact, albeit using a completely accidental or misguided methodology. It is this human tendency of making the world serve or reflect our philosophies and beliefs that I find intriguing, especially in the context of a natural history bestiary.
My abbreviated Bestiary affords me the opportunity to combine traditional physical techniques such as copper-plate photogravure and letterpress. In the resulting portfolio, craft and technique play as strong a role as the content, as in their medieval predecessors. The photogravure and intaglio plates are printed onto Lana Gravure paper, then text (letterpress) and 24K gold leaf are added.