Winds of Smoke and Water

The Barr Gallery at Indiana University Southeast featured Deborah Maris Lader for the Mid America Print Council Conference which ran from October 5^th-8^th. Vader was recognized as an MAPC Outstanding Printmaker and is the founder of the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative.  Her exhibition was titled ‘Against All Odds’ and featured etchings with chine colle’, screen prints and wood cuts.  Deborah Maris Lader’s  collection features imagery depicting small girls, large birds, hands and trees throughout the body of her work.  She explores a whimsical landscape that is filled with distortions of reality that create a surreal narrative full of fantastic creatures. 

In her piece, Winds of Smoke and Water (etching with chine collé), she depicts the distorted figure of a girl. Her torso elongates into that of a tree, her legs root beneath the ground. Her hair is streaming behind her and red wings have sprouted from her back as she holds a torch in her hand.  From the look on her face and her body position she is trying o scare off the large bird-like creature before her. There are legs running above the girl and the gust of wind turns into hands moving through the trees behind her. The images of the girl and the birds are ones that are used throughout her prints but the symbols are especially dark and ominous in this piece. The movement of the hands around her body and through the trees, around the bird, leads the eye through the landscape. The fingers pulling at her hair, the running legs and her facial expression create a sense of dread, a need to escape. The quality of her drawings, child like at times with great variations in value, emphasizes the base, childlike fear. As if a bed time story has gone horribly wrong.  This foreboding is what made this piece so successful, it is almost magnetic.

In comparison her work, Lori’s Dove (woodcut), deals with lighter subject matter. Two hands hold a cord upon which a dove is perched, another  below is open and the lines of the hands extend into roots that expand upon the entire bottom of the work. Above more birds sit on a wire above a leaf bare tree from which a rope swing hangs. The symbols lead to a feeling of support and uplifting, as the wires hold up the birds. The hand is open to the viewer.  The quality of the wood cuts also gives a certain roundness to the details of the image, which seem more welcoming that harsh lines.

The work of Deborah Maris Lader in Against All Odds is breathtakingly surreal and depicts scenes of child-like wonder in visual narratives.  Her work is a wonderful exploration of personal symbolism and the psychological.

- Amelia Wise