Ten years ago, I began to develop a concept that I had for a commercial custom digital substrate. The idea was to design and create an assortment of products that could be printed as a flat sheet and then post print could be easily assembled into a variety of different solutions/applications. The sheets of flat paper card stock are pre-perforated and scored. Post print the waste can be popped away and the design folded up to have a finished three-dimensional object. Three years later I started my own business with this custom digital print substrate. Primarily designed for the Commercial Graphic Arts industry, the product line, called Digital Fold-Ups has provided me with a means to investigate many creative avenues for its application, all of which is heavily informed by my background in the arts and digital print industry.

This body of work is a formal investigation of abstraction as it relates to space, pattern, and texture (visual and tactile) with digital toner, giclee (zhee-klay) printing, and collage. The images developed out of a sampling process that utilized 150 pattern templates derived from a printing related die-cut process, and a series of selected photographs from my personal photo archive.  The 8-1/2” x 11” color images (Concerted Series and Aggregation Series) were generated directly from a variety of template shapes. The Black and White Line -Numbered Series were made from template patterns reduced further into simplified shapes. The Die-Cut Numbered Series translates respectively, each of the images from the Black and White Numbered Series.  All of the printed images went through a process of printing, layering, and reprinting. Several images were run through the digital printer more than ten times for a specific qualitative affect.  

My image-making practice involves a dense and multi- layered use of imagery informed by my early training as a printmaker. The methods of traditional printmaking (intaglio, stone lithography, silkscreen, and woodcut) have distinctive qualities borne out of focused physical processes, which in return produce nuances of mark-making, spatial physicality, and residual evidence from mechanical interaction. Commercial printing, which involves offset and digital, aims for an image quality that is void of physical residue associated with the mechanical process.  It is in the residual space, which is affected by the hand of the practitioner, that a printed image comes alive and is perceived on a haptic level of experience.  Traditional processes of printmaking afford these haptic qualities which were/are desired and celebrated.  I have come to realize that digital printing also has these affordances. Much like any other artist’s medium, digital printing has qualitative affects that can only be arrived at through an exploration of its capabilities and limitations. My digital print work is made using the Xerox iGen, which continues to reveal new results and exciting surprises; not unlike those found in some of the traditional printmaking processes.

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