Artist Statement

Since my childhood, nature has provided me with a place for contemplation and a creative muse. I take every opportunity to soak up the sunshine and explore our vital ecosystems. Minuscule details open to whole new worlds of hidden treasures for investigation. Recent adventures in New Mexico, along with my work with scientists, have reawakened this passion and have inspired this body of work.

 My practice is a collaboration with materials and the natural world. A daily ritual of setting thin Kozo papers in the sun, weighing them down with found rocks, and pouring homemade walnut inks onto them has become a foundational practice. As the sun shifts and intensifies, a unique record of evaporation is recorded in the fibers. I photograph the stains to create printing matrices as well as use the stained paper in the work. I am interested in the reticulation patterns created through the process and how this act embodies chance.

 My work has long been an examination of the natural world through the lens of micro-biology; I search for structural commonalities between invasive plants in ecosystems and invasive diseases in the human body. At the same time, I am invested in combining and applying historical and non-traditional approaches to printmaking, specifically print-installation and repetitive mark-making, to push the boundaries of printmaking into what has developed into an expanded field. I create modules to build installations or to make unique prints by intuitively combining printing plates in different sequences, creating one of a kind works that slowly unfold and grow on their own. 

 I am fascinated by the beauty and potency contained in microscopic life forms that are, quite literally, threatening to other life forms. Cellular structures can reproduce, mutate, and spread without regulation. I’ve recently begun work based on bryozoans with the help of scientists Thomas Trott and Matthew Dick. These scientists have graciously shared their image databases, and I am digitally altering, mutating, and combining bryozoan colonies, separating individual zooids into modules, and using them to visually grow new digital colonies that are created into printing matrices and often combined and layered with the stain imagery. 

 The paper I use is translucent; appearing delicate and fragile but its long fibers make it resilient to manipulation. Its strength is a commentary on how strong our Earth has been; yet it is desperately in need of our protection and intervention. My manipulation of the bryozoan colonies speaks to humans’ detrimental desire to control the natural world. As a society, we refuse to think about or work to change the long-term effects of our attempts to control nature. Our careless actions are a type of stain on the planet. Often nature fights back/responds; colonies often grown in response to our  intervention in ways we cannot control. This imagery is providing me with a fresh visual language that lends itself to my formal exploration of repetition, pattern, deeply hidden beauty, destruction and exponential growth. 

 -Marilee Salvator