Brooke Mullins Doherty

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Biorhythms Artist’s Statement



For the past four years, I have been exploring events in my life and my reactions to them through a weekly monotype series, my Biorhythms prints. The prints are trace monotypes, combining the positive print of white paper with drawn ink lines with the negative reversal of the image that is left on the inked plate. I follow a changing set of rules within each year's prints that guide my process and imagery, but the overall rules involve taking time to reflect on my week and its most significant occurrence before making the print, which provides visual form to my life as well as structure to my studio routine.


I began the first year of Biorhythms prints in August 2013 when I stopped taking birth control pills with the hope of conceiving a child. I thought that the prints would be a way to visually explore my thoughts about what was happening during pregnancy in an unseen world within my body. I also imagined that the weekly format of the series would mirror the weekly descriptions of the baby's growth and changes. The positive image connected in the middle to the negative image underneath, connecting my outer world to this world within. Instead, the first year of Biorhythms documented an emotionally dark year of wild hormone changes, mood swings, and unpleasant physical consequences of my body trying to adapt to resuming control of its own hormones after 16 years of hormonal contraceptive use. The Van Dyke Brown I chose as my color for the year's prints went from feeling maternal and earthy to resembling blood on a battlefield as the year progressed. There is a murky atmospheric quality to many of the prints that mirrored my own thinking at the time.


I began the second year of Biorhythms prints in August 2014 as a continuation of the first year's rules but with a change to blue ink to resemble lines on an old map, which seemed an appropriate reference for me as I felt my life was heading into terra incognita, a very different place than I had planned for and one I knew very little about. I tried to remain open to possibilities in these prints as well as in my overall life. I did not feel compelled to observe the former rule of lines meeting in the center or any other compositional rule. I named these prints after phases of the moon, as I tried to align myself with natural processes and go where the current was taking me. Twelve weeks into the series, I did become pregnant and so many of the prints did explore the connection between my world outside and the new life developing inside that I had initially sought to depict. My son was born on a full moon in the final week of the series' year, which seemed auspicious.


My third year of Biorhythms prints explores my new life as a mother and my connection to my son, physically and emotionally. I chose black ink for these prints and subtitled them all "infancy." Begun the first week of my son's life outside of my body, I initially planned for each week to start with the symbol of a tree and how that tree was growing and changing. I eventually started breaking this rule as there were many other ideas I also wanted to explore in my prints.


My fourth year of Biorhythms is a continuation of the rules established in the third year, but with a change to Payne's Gray ink and more deliberate titles expressing some of my guiding ideas and events behind each print. I have fewer rules concerning my imagery but am continuing the thorough journaling process that precedes each print. My imagery this year has ranged from nonrepresentational abstraction to direct representation, which I have not used in my work for many years. This series has been the catalyst for many changes to my imagery in my other work.


I began my fifth year of Biorhythms in August 2017.






Copyright 2017 by Brooke Mullins Doherty.  All rights reserved.