ARTIST STATEMENT
A love for words and images, and love for the design and craft of letterpress printing drive my work. I print with wood and metal type, linoleum, and (sometimes) digitally created photopolymer plates on a Vandercook Universal 1 press. During the recent pandemic I have explored monoprinting with acrylic paint and stencils from a Gelli plate – and found I enjoy the immediacy of working in this manner.
For “Mary F. Doherty” I was inspired by the letters of my maternal great grandmother written to my great grandfather in the year leading up to their marriage in 1887. Because some of the letters were so faded as to be unreadable, I volunteered to scan and decipher them. I barely knew who Mary Doherty was when I accepted the letters from my sister. I am touched by how my great-grandmother writes about her ‘scribbles’ in ‘led’ and when I noticed that her fingerprints became visible once I processed the letter in Photoshop, I felt connected to her. Digitally printed are the scanned letters, and two photos of my great grandmother- one on her wedding day and one on my mother’s wedding day, a map from 1913 showing the house where my great grandparents lived for many years built in 1897, located on 123 Wisconsin in Indianapolis, and a 2009 Google Streetview photo- captured before house was torn down.
Letterpress printed are a type-high block of the photo used in her obituary, made by my grandfather, in May 1955. I printed the front as well as the back of the block, to accentuate its materiality. Because I remember the house on Wisconsin with a beautiful tall flower garden buzzing with bees, I included letterpress ornaments of bees and butterflies, a monoprint flower and oak leaves, the last referring to the family tree.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Martha Chiplis is a letterpress printer, printmaker, and graphic designer, and coauthor of “For the Love of Letterpress: a Printing Handbook for Instructors and Students,” published in 2013 by Bloomsbury LLC, now in its second edition. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1964, Chiplis resides in the Chicago area. Trained as a painter and printmaker, she worked for many years for a small fine press in Chicago as a letterpress printer and designer. Recurring themes in her work are are family, home, the rights of women, the urban garden and native plants and their role in slowing climate change. Chiplis has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin where she studied painting and printmaking, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in studio art.
© Martha Chiplis