MAPC Outstanding Printmaker Award Recipient: Deborah Maris Lader

During the MAPC conference last weekend, many exhibitions were shown in the Louisville and New Albany area. One of these shows was in the Barr Gallery at Indiana University Southeast.  This exhibition featured the recipient of the MAPC Outstanding Printmaker Award, Deborah Maris Lader. Lader is the founder of the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative. In regards to her work, she says, “I let the process of making guide me where it wants to lead and I’m often surprised by the resulting messages and visual information.” The nature of birds is a recurring theme in her work, which Lader watches and photographs (according to her website). Her familiarity with this subject is evident throughout these works.

Deborah Maris Lader, Uprooted, 2012

One of the notable works is Uprooted (2012), a large, hand-tinted lithograph depicting two human-bird hybrids as the focal point; a larger one is embracing a smaller one. They are surrounded by a path and there is a brightly clothed “mother” bird standing on the path holding a cardboard box that has silhouettes of other birds flying out of it. At the bottom of the piece, the path turns into tree roots and the path at the top leads off the page. The print is very dark and desaturated, except for the mother figure and the hint of a blue sky at the top. The overall darkness of the print creates an anxious feeling, where the artist doesn't want to let the two figures leave their protective area of the surrounding path and embrace. The artist states that the piece came from her own thoughts and dreams and that her children are growing up and beginning to find their way in the world. The artist’s mark-making in the piece gives it an illustrative quality but the minimal use of color isn’t successful. It needs more of the saturation coming into the figures to balance the composition. The coloring of the mother bird and blue sky don’t fit the color scheme of the print well. It would work better if it matched the darkness of the rest of the print. Despite this, the print is still haunting and beautiful.  

Another piece that is visually appealing is In The Reeds, a collagraph. It is a gray-scale print of a textural heron which dominates the composition, with "feathers" and dark scratchings in the background. The artist also scratches over the print, leaving white lines over the bird and the background. This piece is obviously more concerned with the process than the story and depicts the artist's love for the process of printmaking. It feels as though the artist was driven by experimentation and stream-of-consciousness. The dark textures on the heron are attractive and create rhythm in the piece. The starkness of the background and its scratches compliments the focal point very well and the scratches into the print give it tactility. With that being said, the heron needs more highlights to make it more dramatic. Furthermore, it would have been interesting to see the image repeated using different colors of ink on different colors of paper, just so that the viewer would be able to perceive more of the experimental, process-driven nature of the print.

In addition to these two prints, Lader has much more that are currently being shown at the gallery until October 31. In each of them, she has put forth a great effort in making her work intriguing to the viewer. She is definitely deserving of the award bestowed upon her as her love of printmaking shows clearly through her work.