Q3 Awareness Post

Kris Iden is an artist who lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. She earned her both her bachelors and master's degree in Fine Arts and Printmaking at VCU, before pursuing several art residencies and fellowships around the world throughout the early 2000's. Iden has since given several presentations at the VMFA and other institutions, most notably Collecting and Caring for the Fine Art Print and The Language of Print. Her collections have been exhibited as the VMFA, Hollins University, University of Richmond, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and many others around Virginia. Iden is currently represented by the Les Yeux du Monde Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Space and Mass

If you would like to explore more about Kris Iden's experience and her body of work, you can visit her website here.

Iden explores the "intricate beauty of the natural world" through intaglio printing. I enjoyed her explanation of her work, where she says "the paper is a fragment of field where things appear as if moving to space further on." She goes on to say that she relies on her intuition as an essential part of her creative process, which I found really relatable and insightful. Although painting isn't nearly as unpredictable as printmaking, my painting process has recently been reliant on an internal vision similar to the intuition that Iden describes, that introduces a similar element of unpredictability. I liked her admiration of the uncertainty because it presented a different perspective for me.

Her exploration of space was really interesting because she provided a lot of different textures and visual elements in one space. The patterns and prints are all juxtaposed with distinctly different central elements but they somehow all fit together. I noticed how her work contained one continuous element throughout the different pieces combined together, like the squares in the picture below. Although she uses similar colors throughout, she never explicitly uses the same color in 2 pieces that are situated together. The continuity of symbols vs. colors could be interesting to explore in my own work, as right now I have only really been considering color.

Meadows