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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.
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