Animals Playing in the Wild
4-layer screenprint, edition of 35, 35 x 50 cm. 2024
“Animals Playing in the Wild” consists of 35 original editions, along with 3 artist’s proofs, 3 printer’s proofs, and 3 edition variants. It is a four layer screen print, with some layers exposed directly from acetates on which I drew the figures and the jungle. For one layer, I coated the acetate in acrylic paint and scraped it away with needles and my nails before exposure. Scraping and scratching has become an inevitably expressive gesture for me, resurfacing in all my work, whether in printmaking, ceramics, or painting.
The initial drawings came out of live sketches I made while watching a training session of a practice called “animal movement.” It’s a primal but strangely systematic practice, and what really caught me was the drama inside it. As I kept working on this imagery, my interest revealed itself to be a projection of my (and possibly ours) frustration with the polarized and corrupt atmosphere that late stage capitalism has normalized. And aside from a few diaristic drawings, this was the only work I was able to make in a while.
