Carol Hayman
My current works are monochrome photo intaglio prints, pulled at Slugfest Print Studio on an American French Tool Press, from my original photographs. They are printed on BFK Rives and chine collé washi paper, with Charbonnel ink. The themes deal with mythology and myth-making attached to objects and locations from urban legends to Native-American story-telling, with Greek, Roman, Japanese, and Norse mythology, heroes, sheroes, and super-heroes, in comic books, sci-fi tales, and ghost stories told around a campfire. These prints evoke indigenous ways of knowing through stylized, semi-abstracted figurations depicting a potential narrative sequence. Shadows of mythical stories haunt the landscape. The Earth Mother came down to earth through a hole in the sky, filled it with stones, watered by tears, to create humans, animals, and plants, which humans have the duty to nurture and maintain. She guards the pathway to the underworld and is powerful, mysterious, and dangerous. She requires the offering of something personal from visitors to the place for finding directions, an ancient spiritual ground. The landscape ignites imagination to explain the stars, rock formations shaped by forces of water and spring floods, and growing plants. Mythological stories describe how humans first came to a place. Paleoindians made their home within the trees, in rock shelters, or on bluffs, but even the earliest arrivals were preceded by spirits that formed the rocks and springs, clothed the earth in trees and grasses, and invited the animals to live there. Humans are here, but shadows of the spirits are still here too, always watching. Humans made the place their home, found all they needed, and filled the earth with their origin stories. Their shadows and stories are still here. The mythological world is part of being human, these prints bridge past and present, the mystical and concrete. The trees whisper in the shadows, telling stories of the earliest people to live there.
Visit Carol Hayman’s Studio Store for artwork available for sale.
Images from Left to Right
Bubbleheads, polymer plate intaglio prints, 2020
Mermaid, polymer plate intaglio prints, 2019
The Way to the Under World, polymer plate intaglio prints, 2020
Spider Woman Comes out of the Cracks, polymer plate intaglio prints, 2020
Moving Mountains, polymer plate intaglio prints, 2019
Looking at the UFO, polymer plate intaglio prints, 2020