Rust Printing at Neighbors Read:

Found objects capture our attention with their textures, color, connections to history or personal memories. Rust printing enables us to record an object and incorporate it into our lives in more tangible ways. Rust can also be harvested and used as a pigment, with painterly potential. Join this informal workshop to learn how to make rust prints on cloth and explore possibilities for using rust printing in your hobbies or creative expression. Feel free to bring small objects for rusting or discussion. Materials will be provided.

Artist Statement:

"My inquiries revolve around the exploration of place, expressed with mark-making through printmaking techniques, painting, and stitching. My work is influenced by living in the Greater West in the era of the Anthropocene, bearing witness to our fraught relationships with wilderness and wildness. Through wrapping, collecting, and mapping I attempt to create tangible connections with place, embracing the perceived futility of harnessing the intangible, allowing the absurd to take a role in my work. I am curious about the overlap of systems, points of friction, adaptation, and cooperation, and seek the poetic conversations that can be found there. My practice leverages process and alchemy to imbue the work with the complexity I encounter. The resulting artifacts - which have been painted, stitched, folded, buried, neglected, rusted, and/or dyed - may be seen as maps, journals, quilts, or objects of contemplation; image and object become intertwined."

Artist Biography:

Research and process are the roots of Julia March Crocetto's artistic practice. After studying architecture, she became more interested in the possibilities of fibers, painting, and sculpture. Topography, Wilderness, and other influences of the Greater West have become infused in her work, developed over many years of living and working in national parks and across the West. Using the language of traditional quiltmaking and contemporary resources such as LandSat imagery, she investigates water and land use and her own recollections of the West.

Her first solo exhibition was in 1993. In 2004, she was invited to participate in the Holland/Alaska Cultural Exchange in the Netherlands. Since 1985, she has taught workshops in Kansas, Alaska, Arizona, and Colorado. She currently teaches art at Colorado Mesa University. Crocetto received her BFA from the University of New Mexico, summa cum laude, and her MFA from the Oregon College of Art and Craft.