Audrey Danze Blood is an artist and printmaker based in Austin, Tx. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking and a Certificate in Collegiate Teaching in Art and Design from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and her Bachelor of Arts in Visual Art from Bowdoin College in 2013. She teaches Print at The University of Texas at Austin. She has worked as a printmaking lab technician at The University of Texas at Austin, as a research and studio assistant at Zea Mays Printmaking and Haystack Mountain School of Craft, and as a farmer in Sunderland, Massachusetts and in Austin, Texas.
Work Statement - 2024:
Geography, landscape, architecture, topography, and movement are all ways of understanding place. So are emotional presence, light, color, mood, atmosphere, memory, imagination, and our personal definitions of “home.” Through papermaking and printmaking, my work explores the ways in which materiality, process, and the sensorial are tools for understanding our multifaceted relationships with place. From the personal exploration of defining and identifying “home,” to the collective understanding of nature-society relationships in the context of climate futures.
Most recently, I have been using cement and handmade plant-based paper to cast monotypes and rubbings made directly from the ground. The rubbings are put through further processes that translate this surface, either cast in cement, handmade paper, or turned to intaglio prints. I have been exploring materials in my studio that aren’t inherently related to each other and manipulating them so that they can have an empathic relationship. There is vulnerability in the “interstitial space,” the intermediate space, the space where opposites or contradictions meet and are formless, or not constrained to fit a certain mold. I find this space in the meeting of the materials I use - when they become one with each other and when their historical relationship is evident in their own independent form. This intermediate space - not assigned to a specific function, not tied to a specific use or form - relates to the space where contradictions can meet within us. In a social and political climate that seems to have increasing polarity, I want to explore where duality and contradiction can coexist and will look toward these interstitial “spaces” and material relationships to understand the intersection of “opposites.”
This nuanced space of alteration that I find in the materials, I also find in myself. There is a compelling slowness that I know in my studio, in the process of making an etching, and the experience of waiting for cement and pulp to dry. This slowness is tied to my understanding of “home,” my role as observer, listening to growth and pain, bearing witness to it. Over the past years, I have lived in proximity with my mother and late grandmother and have collected objects of meaning related to them. The visual language of installation-based cast work coupled with intimate objects like prints and handmade paper incorporates two scales that engage the body in making and viewership. I explore scale with my own body as a fulcrum - from my place in the landscape of my family, to my place in the scale of climate futures.
The rubbings are a material ghost of pressure between my hand and the surface of the earth. These are not direct transfers of image, but rather translations of surface, memory, and specificity of place. The surface of the work creates a material record in the piece and leaves a ghost behind. Landscape has agency in this process, creating memory while generating moments of potential connection, growth, and energy. A solidified sheet of cement or paper carries the process of the material bonding, just as a print holds the ghost of the change in the surface of the matrix. These ghosts represent a vestige of past charged in the present. As I sit with the inquietude of our time, of our history, and of our predicated futures, I hope to learn how to approach hindsight, and how to nurture a collective imagined future, particularly facing climate breakdown.