MaryAnn L. Miller

SCREEN MONOTYPES

Miller is a visual artist specializing in screen prints and artist books. Her work is in the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

circular forms of olive green floating against a background
ALLELE

A seriograph from Miller's Alleles series, representing her own medical condition.

"My work is about the rudiments of human existence, biological identity, who we are genetically and culturally. I imagine the soundless language of chromosomes within the body at subatomic levels."


A black X and a white X representing female chromosomes
LAVINIA 1

From the Lavinia series, based upon a poem by Lavinia Dickinson, the sister of Emily Dickinson

"Both prints and poems are set out in lines and layers. Layers might be thought of as vertical stacks of lines like verses. Writing lines and revising helped me to see more clearly how to keep layers of color in prints to a minimum and to think about the cumulative effect of the layers especially where they intersect. You could liken areas of a print to the enjambment in the lines of poetry. It's just that the print uses shape and color where the poem uses language. Each requires white space, which is the silence around and between the words. Each requires "negative capability"--- the possibilities that the reader/viewer brings. The marks that comprise prints are abstractions just as words are abstractions in many layers of meaning. "

 

(Editor's Note: An interview with MaryAnn Miller can be seen in this issue. Samples of her poetry are in the poetry section.)

 

MaryAnn L. Miller's book, Locus Mentis, has been published by PS Books (2012.) She has been published in various journals in the Philadelphia area, Kaleidoscope Magazine, and the International Review of African American Art. She has been the Resident Book Artist for the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Lafayette College since 2001. She publishes artist's books through her Lucia Press. Miller co-ordinates the Hunterdon Art Museum Poetry Series in Clinton, NJ. She has Hyperkalemic Periodic Paralysis.