Phyllis McGibbon, Echoes and Reverberations (The Cabinet), 2020, 30-drawer wooden cabinet with print collage works, Courtesy of the artist.

Artist’s Statement

My formal training as an artist was concentrated in print and drawing, but my studio work includes a range of media, including artist books, sculptural objects and site built installations.

I see something poetic in the mechanisms of a print studio and remain fascinated with the way that images can be taken apart, distilled, and expanded through understatement and/or a shift of visual context. In the broadest sense, I am interested in the way that images and ideas shift and mutate as they circulate, not only through my own studio thinking, but also between artists, as graphic preoccupations and processes may be lost, found, celebrated or abandoned repeatedly. If we think about printmaking as a constantly evolving set of transcultural conversations across time, it’s an exciting, open-ended field that continually bridges and revitalizes all kinds of cultural information and visual practices.

The works on view here incorporate reverberations and ghost elements from previous projects, but draw more explicitly from the graphic remnants from printed multiples to offer new associations and potential readings. Having spent a great deal of the past few years transitioning into and out from various renovated studios, I’ve been looking twice at the ephemeral by-products of graphic production, i.e. the working proofs, slip sheets and/or stencils that may point towards fresh associations and new points of resolution. This self-reflexive aspect of studio investigation fuels much of my art, linking projects that might otherwise appear unrelated on first encounter.

I was on sabbatical last year, working in the print studios of the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium and the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, where I was thinking about visual fermentation, blind spots, slippages and remnants, not so much for the sake of nostalgia, but as a response to this fragile moment, when so many aspects of our collective social and scientific progress seem vulnerable. Increasingly, I see that projects that I’ve developed with one set of artistic intentions are circulating, orbiting, and now revealing other, sometimes paradoxical and/or cloaked dimensions. I’m looking for ways to explore those reverberations and contradictions more closely, to work more actively with my own doubts and misgivings.

In the gallery, viewers were invited to gently pull open the drawers of the print cabinet to view the pieces inside.