Dispatches from Maine: Studio Visit with Adriane Herman

Posted by Amze Emmons on August 16, 2012 | 1 Comment

One studio we were sure to visit while in Portland was that of artist and printmaker, Adriane Herman.

Follow the jump and see a studio that is a) more or b) less cluttered than your own.

Art Below.

Prints (above) & Panels (below).

For those of you unfamiliar, you can read more about Herman’s work here. Her work revolving around other people’s lists has been on-going for some time. Her collection has grown exponentially, and exclusively from interactions during exhibitions and lectures about her work. The lists seen individually are like very short stories of a day in the life of one person; when seen collectively they form a sprawling memory palace. Herman honors these stories and memories by constructing prints and tablets of them, in a sense making monuments of our mundane daily ephemera.

Once she gets going through her collection.. Look out!

Having a conversation with Herman about this project and its huge archive is part stand-up routine, and part live episode of This American Life. Like many artists, her primary practice is paying attention to moments in life others often overlook, and then threading those moments into a beautiful tapestry.

Herman was nice enough to show me one of her tablets in progress (below). She builds up a clay surface, then transfers the image and painstakingly carves the surface very much like a woodblock carving. Then she coats the tablet with black clay, and when that is dry, she carefully sands it down to reveal the image in the glossy finished surface you see (above).

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Some more list prints.

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And then Herman was generous enough to show us some zines from her own collection. Most from workshops she recently ran with children and young adults.

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