Art Exhibit – CAROLYN WEBB Work on Paper: Drawings and Prints

Salmon Falls Gallery welcomes Williamsburg, Massachusetts printmaker and sculptor Carolyn Webb for a featured exhibit of her drawings and prints, selected from three series of work.
The Little Elegies series of drawings began after the sudden death of a close family member and at the beginning of pandemic induced isolation. What began a distraction from sadness, confusion, and fear became on ongoing meditative project. Within the limits of the square and the line, Webb found a joy and solace in the infinity of possible tonal and chromatic variations.
The What Was Scattered Gathers series of collagraph and drypoint prints are titled after a quote from Heraclitus: “What was scattered gathers. What is gathered blows away.” These words describe the pulsing vitality of our world whose formal expressions; microscopic or vast, living or not, are under-laid with patterns, energy, and influences in an eternal repetition of expansion and contraction, creation, and destruction. Up to nine plates were used in making these prints with as many as nineteen passes through the press. Webb thinks in terms of building when printing, finding new patterns through changing plate orientations, colors, and ink transparency.
The Gibigianna Suite series is ongoing and began in Venice, Italy in 2020.  Describing her love of water and general fascination with wave patterns to her Italian students, they responded in one voice, “Ah, Gibigianna!”, and then translated it as the Italian word for patterns of reflected light on surfaces; a phenomenon that suffuses all of Venice.  Webb thinks in terms of building when making any art, and these prints were “built” of many layers. Multiple etched copper and aluminum plates were printed in transparent layered inks in various configurations to achieve an atmospheric quality. 
Carolyn Webb’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in private, public, and corporate collections including the University Museum of Contemporary Art, Amherst, the Hyde Collection, the New York Public Library and Meditech Corporation. She is the recipient of many awards including a recent Resident Fellowship at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice, an A.R.T. Grant, a Purchase Award from the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, a Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowship in Sculpture, an Artist Residency Grant from the Vermont Studio Center, and a Ford Foundation Award.
Her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art included a Postgraduate fellowship in sculpture as well as a Scheidt Traveling scholarship. She holds an MFA in sculpture from the University of Massachusetts and is a member of the Boston Printmakers and Zea Mays Printmakers.