Mary Crenshaw - picasso heads
Mary is a process based artist making decisions on the run and constantly reacting and embracing mistakes, miscalculations and so on. The fil rouge across her printmaking work is mediation: mediation between purpose and chance, between planning and intuition, between the artist and the artisan. She approaches printmaking as a language rather than a tool for reproduction, using the matrix for what it’s worth: variations on the a theme.
“I appropriated a painted photograph by Picasso for the first image. I wanted to use the head
as a representation of humankind, thinking about the recent global pandemic and how
everyone has been touched. In the etchings that would follow, imagery began as loose
figuration, transforming into abstraction, with shapes and marks taking over during the
process of making.”
This body of works was developed as an off-spin of a photopolymer plate created in relation to the above quote. It is a series of mono-prints through chine collèe, ghost printing and stencilling. Mono-prints on hanemuhle 300 gsm. white and off-white, 60x80 cm. 2020