Post & Parcel: Monotype Printing
The push for this project was to explore both the exhilarating and the mundane, however one may interpret the two conceding, star-crossing, or polarizing. Getting the mail could be one of the most mundane, grab-from-the-drive-way-after-your-nine-to-five-job, adult things ever, but I don’t see it that way. I fully believe in the resurrection of letter writing. We have moved more and more towards a paperless world, and while yes that has benefits for the planets sake, we are loosing the traces of our existence, the traces of the walking, breathing, stories that we are. I want my children, and my grandchildren, and my great grandchildren to have something to know me by—a little snippet into what my world looked like at the turn of the century, how we spoke, what we spoke about, who I was speaking too, what my musings were—you get the point.
So I set off to evoke that colorful, warm, magical feeling that takes you over when you walk to the mailbox and pull out a letter in your hand. I wanted viewers to feel the nearness and the humanity of it, how each is to its own, one never the same.
This exactly parallels with monotype printing, because “monotype” means exactly and only one, and this specific process within printmaking, means printing from things. So everything you see in these pieces are physical objects that I inked up and individually ran through a press smushed between two sheets of plexiglass. You might recognize a flower, a doily, a piece of string, a polaroid picture. Each letter was also individually stamped in as well, letter by letter. Essentially what I am getting at, is this process leaves each print wonderfully one of a kind, and a product of patience, time, and a labor of love. I have hopes for these prints to perhaps be employed by the postal service or something one day as posters that will help breath life back into the tracing of our stories—the makings of our past.