Artist Statement:

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I was once asked to consider the unique, identifiable language of Print, the essence of printed matter. I thought back to the unwavering dedication of staying inside the imposing black lines of a coloring book page and attempting, in crayon, a sort of printed perfection. The desire to take an image and make it my own, mark by mark.  A thing printed carries a certain credibility, a truth about it. We want to believe what it tells us because of the labor invested, a drawn mark can seem almost fallible in comparison. 

 

I return to this thought repeatedly in my work. Using my own hand printed imagery as well as found printed materials, I create a revised truth by using both printed and drawn marks in order to serve my own need to establish order. The result is a network of self-imposed, visual systems that live in fear of chaos, but are nonetheless drawn to it.

 

Each mark made is an artifact of a process, a visual record of time spent. The repetitive and consuming nature of the mark making is closer to ritual than routine and while each mark is an automatic response to the mark made before it, the insidious autobiographical nature of my work, which addresses issues of identity and dislocation, inevitably impacts the overall content and construction of these images.

 

 

Biography:

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Nichole Maury lives and works in Kalamazoo, MI where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Western Michigan University. 

 

Nichole has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally including The International Print Center New York, the Scuola di Grafica, Venice, Italy, The Chicago Cultural Center, and The Urban Institute of Contemporary Art ,Grand Rapids, MI.  Her work can be found in the collections of The New Orleans Museum of Art, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Iowa City Public Library, Bradley University, Minot State University in addition to many private collections.