Aversion

Smaller prints, 6" x 9", watercolor monotypes.

Larger prints, 22" x 30", multi-method monoprints.

Aversion is a collection of over 55 prints made while in residence at the Fredericton Botanical Gardens and compiled into larger works. The primary goal of this experience was generating community outreach through live printmaking using a portable intaglio press courtesy of Imago (atelierimago.com). However, despite all the interest in printmaking, fiery discussions of inflation, housing, and climate advents were constant, particularly the collective shift in our environment and its 2023's particularly wet summer. 

Memories were likely spurred of the notable destruction of 2018-19 where Fredericton and its surrounding communities were devastated by the largest spring freshets on record. Perhaps most surprising of this ire was how irritated folks were at how friends, family, and neighbors had to deal with these problems and how their lives, finances, and communal ties were completely dismantled by rising rivers. I've explored those advents at length with previous projects, Prepare, Adrift, and Scars respectively, but there's a difference in exploring past traumas and hearing direct impressions of events so cataclysmic that their aftermaths remain ablaze many years later. Conversely, these conversations were set against the backdrop of the summer’s rainfall and splendorous floral bloom; day lily's, black eyed susans and towering goldenrods all arising from overly irrigated bedding. Aversion was to merely act as a documentation of plants within the botanical garden but it became clear there needed to be a shift in focus. 

By forming simple and playful watercolor monotypes, scanning the impressions, re-printing and re-printing again using photo-chemical transfer methods, Aversion has erupted into a sprawling bouquet of uniquely texture and irreproducible monoprints. This uniqueness is too a remainder that this splendor is at risk either by flood or flame, a more prescient fact given 2023 was our hottest summer to date atop the tangible worry that such a drastic shift is now common place.