I am a multidisciplinary fine artist and printmaker with an intense focus on the human body throughout my various bodies of work. I have struggled with allergies from a young age, and as a result I live with a heightened awareness of my body and its inner workings. This awareness has informed my artistic practice for many years.
Each of us forms one unified system: organs, thoughts, blood vessels, emotions, nerves and sensations. While language separates concepts of body and mind I know them to be one, and my work aims to break down the barriers between one and the other. Our bodies are each a totality, a mystery to ourselves that I try to discover, solve, resolve, dissolve. Trying to visualize what the inside feels and looks like congers for me hundreds of layers of patterns and textures that are intricate, complex, dense and beautiful. I call this pattern work “lacery,” and it is present in one form or another in nearly all of my current work.
-Maria Doering, April 2016 The “Inside Me” fabric installation varies in size and is completely site specific. It could take over an entire small room or it could “grow” in the corner/ceiling of the gallery. In order to have the “bulging” effect, shaped chicken wire is attached (nailed) to the wall and the fabric pieces are stretched over this. The pieces are connected with each other through sewing pins, and get pinned or nailed to the wall. The installation consists of many smaller pieces which allow it to be absolutely varied and rearranged as the installation site allows/demands. – Maria Doering, March 2009
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
The smallest building block of the body is the cell. Cellular Formations is a collection of drawings exploring and reinventing the creative building block. The creative cell can develop into an intricate pattern of lace work, a complex structure or simply stand on its own. The simplicity of returning to the single line, single dot on paper and letting the drawing grow from there has fascinated and inspired me. If you could look at creativity and ideas in a petri dish this is what I would see. After working with the complex processes of printmaking and layered painting I craved the simplicity of pen and paper. To just let it out. Let the ideas flow, without complicated step by step processes to get in the way. Return to the beginning the single building block of who I am as an artist. Somewhat an unadulterated purity that seems to get drowned out in the noise of complicated and intense artmaking. As the years pass I find my work gets more complex and more intense, and I need to take a breath from it once in a while. Cellular Formation is a series of drawings on 9×12 watercolor paper, each drawn with black or red ink in a fountain pen. For the love of the creative cell. – Maria Doering, September 2013
“What is a person? Are our bodies filled with a soul? These questions have influenced my art-making for four years. The complex patterns and textures of this work, which I call lacery, is my attempt to visualize what is going on beneath the surface, to try and answer the questions of what we are made of. Lacery is about imagining the sum total of a person’s character, feelings, illnesses, energies, difficulties, and ideas. It is my attempt at a visual representation of the internal dialogue which takes place in all of us. The many smaller paintings are presented as samples of people’s lacery which I have come across over the last several years. Every portrait is of a woman that I have connected with over the years. Each has her own story and personality, and each is a strong, determined and independent woman in her own right. They fight for what they want and believe in, have a strong connection to family, and a multifaceted character. And yet every single person has her own unique set of doubts and challenges. Their portraits are what I see as an outside observer, how every woman presents herself to the world. I have tried to combine this external appearance with a glimpse of the lacery of their being, the patterns swirling beneath the surface, to bring out what the viewer cannot easily glimpse. – Maria Doering, September 2014
Is there a separation between the body and soul, or are they one and the same?”
What would we find if we viewed our personalities, minds and souls through a microscope? Our body and soul, the intangible mind and the physical vessel of our bodies. Together, they make us who we are. If we could visualize both, what would they look like? For six years and counting, I have explored the complex patterns and textures that make up a person. I call this layered pattern work “Lacery”, and it is my attempt to visualize what is going on beneath the surface, to answer the question of what we are made of beyond just flesh and bone. Lacery is about imagining the sum total of a person’s character, physicality, feelings, illnesses, energies, difficulties and ideas. It is my attempt at a visual representation of the internal dialogue which takes place in all of us. The “Cells, Souls and Personalities” series of linocuts gives these intangibilities a voice, to bring them to the surface and anchor them in the visible world. It is a journey deep into the Lacery of a person, distilling it to a single cellular level. What would the smallest part of this complex Lacery be made of? A single cell. A creative cell. An adventurous cell. An ambitious cell. Possibly a courageous cell. – Maria Doering, April 2016
What does confidence, ambition or courage look like on a cellular level?
What is the cellular make up of a soul?
“Cellular Expressions” is an on-going exploration into the idea of the imaginative creative cell. I am trying to bridge the disconnect between the proven science of our bodies at microscopic levels and what we know of ourselves: mind, soul, emotions, being, self, culture, identity etc. How could that intangibility be expressed and shown in the microcosm that is our body? How could you possibly see your “self” on a microscope’s slide? These ideas have developed and carried through my work for more than 10 years. About seven years ago I felt so entrenched in all the complex projects I was working on that there was a desperate desire to return to the basics of black ink on paper. Returning to my first love, drawing, I began exploring with the most basic of tools. A dot and a line. This became a steady, constant drawing practice that has run parallel to four expansive bodies of work that I have created since 2008. These 160+ ink drawings have moved from black pen, to black and red, then eventually other colours were added with ink or watercolour, and finally 7 years later I am exploring the most vibrant inks and colour combinations of my career. Returning to the basics of drawing has allowed me to take the building blocks, the cell, and imagining all of its possibilities, the drawings expand and contract, simplify and again become complicated layered exercises in pushing my own thought boundaries. What could this “creative cell” become? I like to think of this ever-evolving body of work as our internal microcosm, your internal world, microscopic, emotional, imaginative and full of hope. After years of experimenting with “the cell” I am most recently interested in exploring what the atmosphere and environment would be like in this internal world. The drawings have morphed from stylized clinical exploration to lively and breathing expressions on paper. I can’t wait to see where it leads next. – Maria Doering, February 2019