Printmaking, like alchemy, can be described as an alternative chemistry. Like alchemy, the true goal of making prints is more significant than merely making gold, as nice as that would be. The aim of the contemporary printmaker, like the medieval alchemist, is to use material transformations to probe the nature of reality.

My artwork has been shaped by the printmaking techniques I use, and has been transformed as I moved from etching, to woodcut, to digital printing. As the character of my work has changed, my understanding of my relation to that world has also been transformed. By altering a matrix of wood or metal with acid, knives, heat or light, I transfer layers of information from that template to a receptive surface such as paper. The indirection, the careful calculation and the implicit violence of cutting, burning, and impressing are the printmaking rituals that generate my images.

In my work I contrast the organic shapes of nature with the logical grid of culture. When I made my first etching plates, the grid of the press bed organized my plates so I could line up the paper squarely on top of them. Today the kento registration locates my paper against the image on my blocks. Accurate registration gives me the freedom to register many colors, or to rotate a square paper to print the image on all four corners. The computer offers me a mathematical basis for making images that is a natural extension of this way of working. The subject matter of my finished prints reflects my methodical working process: it balances fish against mosaic patterns, wreaths of grape leaves against woven fabric, centipedes against architectural floor plans.

I find similarities in shape between plant, animal and the human body. The veins in a leaf, in an insect's wing and in my own hand reflect the same physical principles. These correspondences help me locate myself in space and time, and measure my connection to nature. In my prints I parallel the image of my own hand with leaf forms, or equate the meanders on a fish with the meanders of a Roman mosaic. The process of printmaking is almost more important than the finished work because it is through attention to planning, cutting and printing that I come to understand relationships that I cannot grasp in any other way. The neutrality of scientific inquiry, outside human emotion, remains the source of my imagery.

April Vollmer, 2003