The IEA welcomed Catherine Miller, of Williamsville, NY, as our artist in residence over the week of June 19th. Catherine, who received her MFA in from SUNY Buffalo, focuses on the maze as a symbol in much of her work. Inspired by the challenges foreign refugees face, the maze serves as an analogy to the trials of navigating various bureaucratic systems and legal and personal challenges to reach political asylum in the United States. She works with Mylar for her drawings and, for her print work, constructs etchings with multiple plates consisting of silk collagraphs, solar, carbordum and relief plates. This process of color sequencing and reordering plates produces one of a kind prints that organically produce the maze-like designs she explores in her work.

During her residency, Catherine worked across laser-etched woodblock and acrylic plates, photo polymer, and digital prints to produce works from her maze design series. These vary in size from 12 x 18″ up to 48 x 48″ and on various papers and presses. The stand out was the polymer plate prints, which nearly mirrored the hand-drawn quality of the drawings that served as their source material. Catherine brought all of her blocks and plates with her back to WIlliamsville and intends to further work on these prints in the coming months.
Below are images from Catherine’s residency