Inside the Studio
Floe
Series of Collagraph monoPrints on handmade paper (2026)
This project moved through a wide variety of physical and conceptual iterations before coming together as a set of collagraph monoprints.
After visually documenting my travels in New Zealand and Australia in 2024, I printed hundreds of tangible photographs. I then cut and shaped the collection of photographs into a large table-size handmade collage. The large collage served as the material for two different projects: a set of spinning color/nature wheels and a series of photo collages on paper.
In 2026, I repurposed the collage series, creating thin paper-based printing plates and hand-printing these on a colorful selection of handmade paper as a two-color collagraph series in my studio in Kansas City.
“The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress.”
Here’s the thing: wherever you go, you can’t bring everything with you. Even though photos are not the ‘real’ thing or place, they can transport us back to specific moments we experienced.
These photos prompt my easy recollection of the delicate smell of early fall in Canberra, the clarity of a dry blue-sky day in Uluru, the dampness of the shade in the fern forest at the National Botanical Garden, and how long the Piha Beach seaside sunset lingered, on and on.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but seeing with new eyes.”
Learning about the color wheel tools used by Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and German-Australian artist and Bauhaus educator Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack inspired me to create my own version.
James Clerk Maxwell, Color Wheel apparatus. Image courtesy of Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge Digital Library.
Instead of blending flat spot colors, my color spinners utilized the colors and textures of places I had recently been. Color and light are inextricably linked, with each coming alive through the other. By placing my photos in motion together, a sense of space and time could be re-activated through this moving color form.
Only by spinning each circle could these memories be newly experienced in this way. And only by holding each turning form could these moments come back alive, while fitting neatly in my hand.
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.”
“The hand is the visible part of the brain.”
People and prints gathered (including one of the large photo collages in the Floe series on the wall, right side) at the end of my Artist Residency at Megalo Print Studio, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Ultimately, this experimental and iterative body of work is about bringing experience, observation, and action together. Each step along the way has enabled an insistence for my hand to enter the work. Cutting and recutting the materials in this series has shaped the Floe imagery in new and unpredictable ways.
Conceptually, the Floe series contains memory and personal history, along with an experimental approach to photography and printmaking. Tangibly, this series is loosely structured and soft in feel, while both abstract and specific in form. My favorite part of these prints is how their colors seem to come alive within each one, glowing from within, like plants in a shade-filled forest and sunset reflections on sea waves.
Re-assembling the photo-collage into collagraph printing plates for the Floe series of prints. Each of the three different plates was inked in two colors, and printed onto handmade papers of different colors.
From Floe, series of two-color collagraph monoprints on handmade paper, 2026.
