Catherine Kernan is a printmaker, painter and author.
She is co-founder, and partner of Mixit Print Studio, a professional open rental printmaking studio in Davis Square, Somerville, Massachusetts, and co-author of, "Singular & Serial: Contemporary Monotype and Monoprint".
The premise that human relationships with the earth are reciprocal and move in cycles of repetition and variation underlies all my work. Deterioration and renewal are genetically ingrained in human perception, and our behavior elicits responses from the earth, something critical to acknowledge as environmental systems are under increasing threat of mutation, and collapse.
In recent work I ask the viewer to re-assemble fragments of information by summoning memories of moving through a dynamic landscape. Overlays and repetitions of images signal the compression of time into simultaneous space, past, current, and anticipated.
Working at the interface between printmaking and painting, I collaborate with the unexpected, surprise and chance, thus ceding a measure of control but always responding to results. The search has become as engaging as the destination so I never print an image the same way twice, uniting concept and process in the repetitions, variations, and accumulations that are part of improvisatory printmaking.
Often now I can look at my artwork and recognize it as true to my experience of space and time, movement and memory. The process is a profound "be here now" experience.
