The Creative Process

In early 1990 my interests returned to photographic images combined with different graphic processes, and here my choice of media assumed a theoretical aspect. I became more interested in the significance of the printmaking process than in its aesthetic result. The ideas of deconstruction and plurality in postmodernism intrigued me, and I started to apply these concepts in my work. For example, I made photo etchings in the Maternity Series from whole rolls of film that I would etch, print, re-etch, until the image deconstructed and disappeared. That disappearance signified to me that the circle of life was complete, from birth to death, from creation to oblivion.

One may ask why one would choose to make prints rather than paint or sculpt. In Prints and Visual Communication William M. Ivins wrote that:

“The various ways of making prints (including photography) are the only methods by which exactly repeatable pictorial statements can be made about anything. This exact repetition of pictorial statements has had incalculable effects upon knowledge and thought, upon science and technology, of every kind. It is hardly too much to say that since the invention of writing there has been no more important invention than of the exact repeatable pictorial statement.”

The plurality and repetition of a pictorial statement allows me to exhaust all possibilities on an idea or a theme until there is nothing left of it, very much like the completion of the circle of life.