Wingate Studio is pleased to announce a new portfolio of 28 monotypes by Elizabeth Atterbury entitled River Poems. This series grew out of the artist’s first project at Wingate Studio, Calligraphy, in which she developed a customized and unconventional use of the intaglio process. Each monotype begins with a colorful arrangement of chine collé cut outs sent through the press and adhered to a backing sheet. The artist then methodically fills the press bed with a selection of shaped plates and the paper is sent through the press once more to emboss the collage, creating a composite image.

While the Calligraphy portfolio was born out of developing and learning how to employ this new technique, River Poems is the fluent expression of ideas that comes with knowing a process well. The artist recycles some of the original plate forms, which directly reference memories, genealogy and every day objects, and has added over 50 new glyphs that are looser and more self-referential in meaning: two hands and a thick horizontal wavy line are forms that appear
in the artist’s sculptural work, some abstract shapes are informed by studio scraps and debris, while others take their form from specialized studio tools. The structured plate arrangements are juxtaposed with lyrical paper form compositions, which describe space, place, celestial and mythical forms.

Unlike Calligraphy, the artist has chosen to give River Poems an overarching structure. The prints were created as pairs that address certain topics or ideas—debris, void, the studio, writing, painting—and often a topic would be re-explored in another diptych, almost rhythmically. The artist has created the pairs along a time continuum beginning in the center with one half moving back into the past and the other moving forward into the future.

Courtesy of Wingate Studio