Kathleen Sherin, “Stable Structures and Disruptive Forces,” July 23 – September 3, 2021

Productive Practice
Curatorial Essay by Shirley Verrico

Kathleen Sherin is a printmaker who has developed a unique and deeply personal method of creating highly energized abstract prints. Working on an etching press, she combines collagraph, relief printing, drypoint, carborundum, chine collé, and monoprint techniques to form dynamic compositions that unify disparate printing processes.

Stable Structures and Disruptive Forces reflects on and reacts to the constant cacophony of upheaval and uncertainty that was amplified by Sherin’s personal isolation and biological vulnerability during the pandemic. The work was produced in two distinct phases; before the COVID 19 shutdown in 2020 and in the spring of 2021 when Sherin and her husband were liberated through vaccination. The pandemic itself, as well as the 15 months of isolation, were major disruptions for Sherin and her productive practice. As a printmaker, Sherin’s work requires the time, space and equipment in her studio; a studio housed inside the communal space of Buffalo Arts Studio. Sherin continued to create art throughout 2020, focusing on safe places and processes, including an outdoor installation for Play/Ground 2020.

Regardless of her medium, Sherin considers and reconsiders the impulses that guide her choices: the intellectual, the physical, the intuitive. Sherin focuses her mind on both the personal and public disruptions that she has felt over the last 18 months. Her thoughts and emotions may become sweeping gestures or staccato carvings. Aggressively inking and scrubbing the plates gives Sherin another outlet for her impulses. Along the way, her process shifts from spontaneous mark making to the careful preparation of the plate. Sherin focuses the physical further, winding and unwinding the wheel that controls the press.These new prints explore the nature of stability through color, gesture, composition, and repetition. Although her palette is limited, Sherin achieves a wide range of surface texture and color density. The physicality of her process can be seen in the sweeping arc of liquid carborundum that produces dark ink marks pressed deeply into the paper as well as in the rich surfaces created by repeatedly rubbing ink on and off the plate. Many of her pieces are clearly assembled, boldly cut and collaged from distinct parts. Searching for simplicity and balance amidst complex, undulating patterns and contrasting spaces, Sherin employs an intuitive process that allows her ideas to unfold and evolve from open-ended concepts.

Sherin also explores installation options that allow viewers direct contact with the papers and the prints. The prints all hang on the wall unframed, and many of the assembled works are held together with pins or magnets. Sherin’s work is always in process; no one piece or print is ever finished and all of the work may be cut and reassembled as something new in the future. As a result, the final works in this exhibition seem especially timely, capturing a precarious moment of stability amidst the chaos of contemporary life.

Biography
Kathleen Sherin was born in Schenectady, and grew up in Easton, New York. She moved to western New York in 1968 to attend the State University of New York at Buffalo and studied nursing. She received her Bachelor of Art in 1981 from Empire College, studying with Walter Prochownick, and a Masters of Fine Arts in 1985 from UB, where she studied with Seymour Drumlevitch. Sherin’s work is in the permanent collections at Roswell Park and Burchfield-Penney as well as many private collections. She has exhibited her prints in over 100 feature and group exhibitions throughout the United States. Sherin has been an active Studio Artist at Buffalo Arts Studio since 2002 and creates her larger prints at the UB print shop as part of the ePIC (Experimental Print Imaging Center) program.

Exhibition catalog available here.

Press Release available here.