ARTIST STATEMENT
Once Upon a Glacier…
“A glacier is a climate indicator. It is also the memory of the planet and life on Earth” (from the Mer de Glace Visitors Center).
In the summer of 1977, I walked on the incredibly beautiful glacier, La Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice) in Chamonix, France. When I returned the summer of 2004, I was shocked by how little was left of it. It had shrunk to a muddy mess since my first visit. There was very little beauty left to see.
I have been thinking a lot about Climate Change and our responsibility to the life of our planet this past year. I feel Mother Earth is getting even, with this pandemic, for all of humanities abuses. This reduction woodcut print is a memorial to La Mer de Glace, as I remember it, from the black & white photo I took on my first visit.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Originally from New York City, Cathie Crawford lived overseas six years in Saudi Arabia and France. She returned to Peoria in 2004 from Grenoble, France. She has concentrated on the color reduction woodcut since earning an MFA degree in 1987 from Bradley University In Peoria, Illinois where she had a one-person retrospective in December of 2016.
Her work has been included in more than three hundred exhibitions, thirty solo exhibitions, eighty seven juried national shows and eighteen international juried exhibitions since completing a BFA from The Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio. Crawford has received forty five awards at both the national and regional level. Her woodcuts have been exhibited in twenty-eight states as well as Bulgaria, France, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and the UK.
Crawford’s prints are included in private and corporate collections in eight countries including the International Print Center New York in New York City; The American University Museum in Washington DC; The Safeya Binzagr Darat in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the Newark Public Library, Newark, New Jersey and the Peoria Riverfront Museum in Peoria, Illinois.
© Cathie Crawford