ROAMING PROCESS

“ROAMING PROCESS consists of Fifteen 19” x 15” hand-pulled photopolymer gravures, toned with a surface roll, printed in an edition of 5 +2AP, using a non-toxic process that combines the digital with the intaglio, and that relies mostly on the chemistry of light and water.

ROAMING PROCESS is shaped by my constant, usually unconscious exploration and evocation of what it feels like to have lost my parents at an early age, as etched in light. They died a long time ago, my father when I was five and my mother when I was 15. In my previous work, “Out of Range,” this search mostly occurs in stilled twilight and fog, along snowy fields and the edges of ponds and woods. Those places are a part of me, but I grew up in Philadelphia. I’m a city kid. But after my parents died, I left Philly and for many years I was rarely in one place for very long. My rootlessness rooted me. Often, the view out a car or train window felt more like home than wherever I was living. Over time, I’ve developed a kinship with bridges and highways, trestles and roofs, with the husks of industrial towns that race by at two or three in the morning. Roaming is about my brief inhabitation of these places.

Have you ever felt the lingering sway of the journey just taken, or felt the anticipatory pitch of the voyage yet begun, or maybe you’ve gently pressed your fingers upon your closed eyes to see what colors are there, and you see the flicker of an unforgotten afterimage, maybe the afterglow of roads and bridges, floating in the fleeting, purplish murk of your memory?

I want to make a picture that looks like that.

The images occur in liminal spaces outside your network, where your phone says it’s roaming and you think, “That applies to me as well.”

Vaune Trachtman