Copperplate Etching, Traditional and Modern Techniques and Exploring Philosophical Concepts

The main idea that I worked with and that evolved through this process is that death created time, and that our bodies are confining vehicles used to accomplish or do what our mind/ soul needs to express. Although death may not seem like a clear theme in these pieces, the temporal significance of our bodies is something that is attached to death, the ultimate end of our physical self. Our bodies are the physical manifestation of the self, a fleshy concept of who we are or want to be. I focused on the female figure in my prints as a means to understand the importance/unimportance of the human body, but also the sexualization of a woman’s body. I am most interested in body language and the shape of the body itself without it being seen as appealing, alluring, or sexual by any means and what makes such a figure evocative, which I explored through different poses to see what they instilled in the viewer and myself. Both the content and process that I worked in this summer derived from Hegel’s concept of absolute Spirit. Hegel contested that there is a collective consciousness that he called absolute spirit and it is both in itself and for itself and exists in time but not space and is the driving force in the development of human consciousness and culture. That history is a temporal sequence of the arrangement of thought. My work was made in a developmental process where each piece was made consecutively, a meditation on the progression and development of my consciousness expressed in my art. Collectively the prints I made are an expression of the development of an idea, but individually they hold their own significance, and ultimately time was extremely important in my research