This copper plate is on its second life—it was initially etched in the photogravure workshop I took at PNCA in 2018 (my first printmaking class ever!). I didn’t love the resulting image, so a year later when I was taking additional printmaking courses at Portland Community College, I scraped it down and created this image. Some areas of the plate were fairly deeply etched, so vestiges of the previous image are still visible, particularly in some of the rocks along the bottom.
The image is intended to suggest an uncommon view of a forest: a cross section that allows the viewer to simultaneously see above and below ground. Its creation involved several processes, including soft and hard ground and drypoint. As I worked, I began thinking about how it might be interesting to create the stones as individual tiny plates. I settled on the composition shown here, with the blind-embossed stones breaking up the image. (I had to work up a bit of courage before taking the jigsaw to the full plate! That was slightly harrowing…)
