Over the past twenty years, Nancy Graves has produced an extraordinarily varied body of work in an ever-expanding range of mediums, including painting, film, costume and set design, and print. In comparison to her painting and sculpture, Graves's prints have received little attention. This beautiful book illustrates Graves's entire graphic oeuvre and illuminates the artist's exacting concern for matters of form, material, and process.
In his essay, Thomas Padon offers an overview of Graves's printmaking activity and discusses the development of her complex visual language. In the interview with the author, Graves offers the first discussion of her specific interest in printmaking, her methodology, and the role of the medium in her overall oeuvre. The second half of the book constitutes a catalogue raisonne of Graves's graphic work, which comprises nearly 200 prints made at many of the leading printmaking workshops, including Tyler Graphics, Graphicstudio, and 2RC Edizioni d'Arte. Most of these works are published for the first time in this comprehensive volume.
Graves is unusually attuned to the phenomena of nature. A passionate interest in science led her to introduce unorthodox forms drawn from astronomy, botany, cartography, and zoology into her art. In the last decade, her intellectual pursuits have taken a more humanist course as she has recast world history into an enigmatic pictorial idiom. Graves has spoken of her desire to make art out of what she terms the "shards of art," and she has assembled a cache of images drawn from various disciplines, eras, and civilizations.