While I trained as a sculptor, I always made drawings, and much later in my practice I turned to printmaking. I love the iterative process of printmaking: overlapping the image, cutting into the plates, cutting into the paper, layering mark over mark, image over image. Although I may print one or two pieces in a similar fashion, I’ve never been one to make editions. I use the printmaking process to come up with a finished image and once it’s finished, it’s finished.

My work has always been figurative and representative of the world around me, as well as of the thoughts inside my head. I’ve carved wood and cast paper, made drawings, built installations, and now most of my practice revolves around printmaking.

About 15 years ago when, in the middle of a drawing, I was plagued by all the noise in my head, I started to write things down, perhaps to purge them perhaps to sort them out. But instead of recording this in my journal, I started writing in the drawings. I found the tangle of my hair, a perfect place to hide my thoughts. Hidden in plain sight (so to speak) and from that point on, most of my drawings, prints, and sometimes even my sculpture contained text, sometimes recorded, sometimes stenciled, sometimes handwritten, and sometimes printed or debossed into the paper. The text varies, it’s mostly personal, sometimes literary, always political and deals with all those issues we battle with every day.

There are several series of works using my own face and some with the hands of the people I love. Some work is inspired by my mother’s aging and loss of independence. We exchanged letters and used them as text over my image to cope with her circumstances and projections towards my own. I did some research into my background and based some of my texts on these family secrets; both mine and others. I explored the changing relationships of parenthood, family, identity, love and loss, and am always concerned with the downward social spiral I see around me. I find I use artmaking as a means of negotiating a way through some of the irreconcilable behaviors I encounter in myself and in the world around me.

I earned my MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, with a major in Sculpture and a Minor on Drawing and studied with Calvin Albert, Robert Zakarian and George McNeil. I also attended the Art Students League, New York, NY, and studied with Bruce Dorfman. I have my BFA in Painting from Lake Erie College, Painesville, OH. I’ve taught at Lake Erie College, the University of South Alabama, Mobile, Alabama, the Westtown School, Westtown, PA and Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA where I am Professor of Art and Women and Gender Studies, Emerita. My teaching

informed my practice and has kept me focused on maintaining a conversation with my community.

Lucy C. Gans

Allentown, PA