Rachel Ross

My artistic journey started with a focus on graphic illustrations until a traumatic event in my 20s led me to stop for over 10 years. When I began making art again, I found myself drawn to obsessively detailed symmetrical compositions, which provided a sense of control, often allowing myself to obsess over it and enabling me to achieve high detail. As a multidisciplinary artist, I have an appreciation for all forms of artmaking, but I am currently exploring printmaking techniques and the embossment achieved by the printing press. I find myself challenged by color and spent years working strictly in black and white, but have been incorporating more color into my palette, which are often muted earth tones or vibrant retro shades such as teal, mint, purple, and yellow.

Nature is a major influence in my artistic choices, having spent the majority of my childhood barefoot in the wilderness. I seek to create art that is politically motivated because I am passionate about, feminism, human rights, and environmental justice. I feel a personal sense of obligation to address these issues and believe that creating art is a way to connect with others, as many of us feel detached from society and unable to make an impact, which can lead to feelings of helplessness. My current works highlight the relationship between the earth and the impact humans have on it, which includes a variety of issues such as pollution and deforestation. I tie my themes together with ribbons of humor and pops of color, whimsy, and fantasy.

I have been inspired a great deal by the large-scale paintings of the female body by Jenny Saville as well as the paintings of Judy Chicago which are full or movement and rhythm, a little whimsy, and a lot of feminism. I often include either actual or implied movement in my art as a reference to the flight mode triggered by my trauma and the experience of moving every few years. I am constantly moving and changing as I grow and heal, and I choose to represent that desire for growth within my art.

Retro Perspective Monoprint and Collagraph 2022

Brown Bagged

Collagraph 2022

Plastic Planet is a series that begins with a simple collagraph plate. When I started experimenting with collagraph plates, I was encouraged to explore different materials to glue to the board to achieve different textures and value scales. I began to test marks made by organic “waste” such as leaves, pine needles, and moss, and as I developed this process I began to include inorganic waste objects to create more contrast. This gave me the idea to juxtapose the different kinds of “waste” items left on our planet, one designated so by humans and the other created by humans. I began by laying objects directly onto the press bed to create prints, the most successful of these objects were the delicate nets used to package grocery items.

Printing with netting is a unique process because the nets cannot be completely controlled. As they pass through the printing press, they move or shift positions in unexpected ways, similar to how in nature these objects have reached a point where they are unable to be controlled. This creates a unique collaborative process I have with the materials because while I initially choose where to pose the objects, that does not mean that is where they will stay. This spontaneity fuels my practice, leaving me in suspense as to what the final print will look like. It is an interactive process because I am constantly having to adjust to the needs of the materials and push the limits of the marks they are able to achieve. The collagraph plates will emboss the details of the materials into the paper which gives an added three dimensional element to the final prints.

The progression of prints within this series include the early stages of exploration, starting with a large collagraph collage print. Next I began printing netting onto paper and an assortment of maps. At this point, the overarching theme of my prints had developed, a commentary on global pollution, specifically the plastic in our oceans. The resulting prints are not the typical style I previously enjoyed creating, but as I explored printmaking, this style developed naturally from working with the materials which led me to follow wherever the art took me. Every print builds off the previous one, as I developed my plates and printing of raw materials, and eventually combined the two processes. I will continue to explore these techniques to expand this collaborative process into three dimensional forms. My next goal is to find an artist studio where I can begin collecting waste materials on a larger scale to combine printmaking with sculptural designs.