Like Leaves Like Ashes Like Stars

This portfolio of prints, Like Leaves Like Ashes Like Stars, is a record of enduring ruminations on the way we experience and think about time: geologic and human time, cyclical and linear time, event-based and dream time, pandemic and deep time. Originally titled The Book of Eternal Returns, the project acknowledges the way images and ideas recur and rhyme across time spans.

The works range from hand drawn to photographic, diagrammatic to poetic. A variety of printmaking techniques were employed including etching, collagraph, lithography, relief, and direct transfer. All images are on Hannemuhle Copperplate Warm White paper. There are three editioned, numbered sets and one unique set that includes all of the editioned prints plus some additional one-of-a-kind images.

Scattered throughout the portfolio are many visual and literary references to other artists and authors who have similarly reflected on the nature of time. These include Samuel Beckett, Annie Dillard, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Francisco Goya, Philip Guston, On Kawara, William Kentridge, Hans-Jost Frey, Wallace Stegner, Cy Twombly, Diego Velasquez, Walt Whitman, Jack Whitten, Terry Tempest Williams.

Like Leaves Like Ashes Like Stars began unwittingly while working in the etching shop at the Kulturwerk BBK Berlin in 2016; over the ensuing years, the project took on a life of its own, most intensively during the pandemic years of 2020-2022. It was completed at Vertigo Press, my home studio in St. Louis, Missouri in 2023.

I am grateful and fortunate to have had studio assistance from artists Erin Johnston and Avery Johnson who, each in their own special way, kept me and the project on track and the studio alive with good spirits and dedication. Ross Press and Bindery built the beautiful boxes and printed the colophon in 2024.