Tough Love

This piece is a collaboration between artist and nature. It shows what can happen when a print-maker discovers that plywood, like wine and cheese, improves with age. Exposed to extremes of heat-sun-cold-rain-snow-ice-wind, each element chiseled away at the plywood, de-laminating it unevenly to create strangely beautiful objects with dramatic textures and irregular edges. I took over where nature left off. With a love of wood and a respect for toughness, I noted that the plywood had succumbed to time but refused to die. To accentuate the wacky beauty of nature’s work, I incorporated color and hand-printed collaged papers to inject new life into the irrepressible plywood. –Artist statement