Artist Statement
Adrienne Momi
What is art? A meditation on beauty? A representation of the physical world? A call for action? It is all these and more. I see my art as a meditation on tension--of merged dualities. Scholarship/ esthetics; the inner/the outer; the masculine/the feminine, the light/the dark?
For sixty years, I have exhibited my work nationally and internationally as a professional printmaker, book artist, painter and hand paper maker. I have created monumental site installations exploring our relationship with the environment, and delving into the collective unconscious of our culture. Communicating with the universe in such "big" ways, these site specific projects have changed lives, and fostered new ideas in their viewers as well as in their maker.
Process is my muse and with her help, I explore daily life, motherhood, sexuality, aging and our human relationship to the Earth. Find textures, layers of marks and vivid hues in my studio watercolors and oils; notice the variety of techniques I use to make monoprints; rejoice with me in the landscape’s beauty in my pleine-aire pieces. My work is a magical personal vision of our world. You can see the world and life through my eyes.
For twenty years, I taught art, humanities and mathematics. The focus of my scholarship was mythology dating as far back as the Anatolian Neolithic. My teaching responsibilities have extended from the Mythological Studies Department at Pacifica Graduate Institute to the Women's Studies Department at the University of Missouri St. Louis, and the Mathematics Department at St. Louis Community College.
I have lived, taught and made art in Florence, Italy; Brno, Czech Republic; and Catalhoyuk, Turkey, and have presented numerous papers, lectures and workshops at international conferences. Now retired from my academic career, making art is once again my full time occupation. Just for fun, I wrote, illustrated and published a children's book, “The Amazing Adventures of Radish Toe.”
Settled now in Sebastopol, CA, I am full time doing what I love to do: printmaking and bookbinding. Printmaking provides me with a tactile connection to the image: carving a woodblock, texturing a collagraph, cutting out a pochoir. Bookbinding is the entry into my secret stash— ghosts, drafts prints, two sided prints, even the planting plans for my garden—remnants too interesting to discard.
Trained as an oil painter in the 1960’s, I traveled to Florence, Italy, after twenty years of making abstract expressionist oils and hyper-realistic watercolors. Thus began my journey as a printmaker. Embracing etching, monotype, collagraphy, woodcut, pochoir, and letterpress, I often print on handmade paper. Relentlessly exploring new ideas, I push the limits of tradition without losing my quirky aesthetic. I took a five year sabbatical from the studio in 1998, to work “in the field” creating monumental paper installations in Czech Republic and Turkey. Returning to Santa Cruz, I founded Momi Lani Paper Arts, a school for printmaking, book arts, and papermaking; and wrote and published “The Amazing Adventures of Radish Toe,” a children’s storybook featuring my monoprints on handmade paper. Now I live in Sebastopol. What a journey! I have never been bored.
My books, monotypes and monoprints are often created from the inside out. By using hand made paper, I can introduce “secrets.” By chopping up plants, a print or decorative paper in the pulp I can add hidden dimension. By overprinting a watercolor etching, or woodcut that somehow did not hit the mark, I imbue the new work with depth. While not all work contains that level of intention, each series is rich with multiple levels of symbolism. Poetry, puns, random printed or written words, double meanings abound. The printing techniques are straight forward: collagraph, woodcut, polyester litho, drypoint, solar plate, relief pochoir, letterpress. I mix them up—sometimes in one image. And then, there is gilding, the legacy of my years in Firenze. No need to analyze which techniques I have used, simply respond to the result.
