Auflösung: German n. – the solution of a Problem, Mystery or Puzzle

I struggle with severe allergies to a very wide range of foods, and many elements of the environment.

On microscopic levels, I am challenged everyday by what I eat and what surrounds me. As much as I strive for the “Aufloesung” of my body, I confront its mystery at all times. Every year something new is added to my list of dangerous substances. As a result, I have become highly aware of my body and any small change in the way I feel. This awareness has saved my life several times.

I think and feel through my process and my work. I am a workaholic. I love being physically challenged by my medium. All printmaking processes require all of me. I work hands-on feeling my body in action. I am always amazed by what my body can achieve despite all the obstacles that my allergies present. I love the challenges of being a printmaker. Lithography is all about problem-solving. For me, the problems are, most importantly, solvable. Lithography is mysterious and moody like a person. It takes a lot of experience, a knowledge of chemistry…gum, acid, absorbency, an understanding of the grain and its ability to hold ink, and still there are new and unforeseen outcomes and challenges with this medium. The humidity in the environment and room temperature, for example, could change or destroy everything that I have created if I am not aware. The long processes required in printmaking techniques like lithography offer me the discipline and time that I need to think through my work and my self. Drawing on a lithography stone is a most rewarding and meditative activity. I am able to think deeply when I am in the drawing. I completely clear my mind of everything but the moment of realizing the work. Drawing the body or a specific portrait on a litho-stone by gently building up delicate values through the different tones of lights and darks, is like staring into a soul for weeks at a time. It is the most intimate of experiences.

Making the surface transparent; breaking down the borders where the inside begins and the outside ends; pulling the inside out; letting the inside become the surface that inhabits the environment; these are considerations, processes and techniques by which I am trying to understand the entity that is me. While gestures, expressions, rashes, hives and illness are common manifestations of the body’s complexity on the outside, I seek to imagine what happens beyond. Through my imagining, I come to myself. What if the internal patterns and textures are literally brought to the surface? What if they become part of the environment? Would I discover greater insight and understanding of my body and its intricacies? The interlace of systems, which I call “lacery”, delicately functions together and is so easily disrupted and turned against itself and its elements each to the other.

Each pattern I create is another layer that I extract from this lacery that is inspired by cellular and muscular structures, patterns of blood vessels, the nervous system, emotions, thoughts and feelings.

Printmaking processes function as systems of layering. Print mediums allow me to create the patterns as matrices that I can reuse over and over again: A matrix for a matrix. Through carving the patterns into linoleum, I am externalizing them. By making the intangible three dimensional, I create a collection of different textures – a vocabulary of patterns, to describe all the different layers in the lacery that is me.

To make it, to create it with my hands, means it is real and it is mine.

In traditional Printmaking, paper functions as a support that carries the image. In my work, I use almost transparent materials like ricepaper and fabric. Light can pass through them and the front and back of the works become equally important. For me, the printed support becomes a porous skin. Patterns flow between the different layers of the material and the viewer is invited to penetrate the surface and to look through and inside.

The reactivity of my body to its environment has always been a mystery to me. Externalizing the lacery that I envision my body to be made of has been a key in coping with the frustrations and endless restrictions that I am faced with daily. To allow myself to visually tear through the surface, dissolve my body’s public identity and to see my ‘self’ as whole and at one with my environment, has enabled me to understand my life’s complexity and through my art work, to approach a visual and conceptual expression of AUFLÖSUNG.

– Maria Doering, March 2010