ARTIST STATEMENT
Our histories are created and defined by our memories. I have become the keeper of my family’s memories, another in a long line of women who saved photographs, magazines, scraps of papers, old school books and scribbles from children who long ago became adults and are now gone. From antique shops and flea markets I have also collected the images of other lives long gone. Who were they? What are their memories? I have taken the images and shadows of those people and used them in my exploration of personal history and identity. Like life, printmaking provides a mixture of intention and accident that is challenging—and exciting.
My prints are generally single, unique images rather than multiples, even though the same plates are often used repeatedly to create a series of prints that may have elements in common. I favor non-toxic methods for making prints such as monotype, solar plate and collagraph. Monotypes are created with ink on plexiglass or another substrate. Solar plate etchings are created using thin steel plates covered in a photosensitive emulsion that is developed with light and water. Collagraph plates are generally made by building up a surface on a matboard plate with the addition of acrylic gels, carborundum, or various other materials adhered to a substrate to create textures and images that can be inked and run through a press. Textures can also be pressed and lines incised into the surface to achieve different effects. Mylar stencils of images I have found and collected provide the figurative elements in these prints.
BIO
Sheryl Trainor is a printmaker living in White River Junction, VT. She studied painting at Massachusetts College of Art and was introduced to printmaking after moving to Vermont in 1995. She has studied with such noted printmakers as Joel Janowitz, Ilana Manolson, Sarah Amos, Catherine Farish and Dan Welden. She is an artist member of Two Rivers Printmaking Studio in White River Junction, Vermont and the Monotype Guild of New England. Her work is in private collections around New England as well as the collections of the Boston Public Library, Plymouth State College, the Hood Museum of Art, and the University of Vermont as part of Two Rivers Printmaking Studio’s Portfolio 2008 and 2011.
