On Printmaking
I’ve always done prints and drawings, always. No one buys those installations, so when you see things that are portable that I’m not attached to, they’re probably two-dimensional. If you get an installation of mine, you inherit [my assistant] Ryan, myself, a crew, the dog, the noise, the dirt. We wreck the house. So if you don’t want that, then you get prints and drawings. The prints are getting a lot of airplay because Tandem Press has been very successful at promoting them, taking them to all the print fairs, so maybe now people are noticing them more.

I don’t know how this show [at the Dorsky] got put together. Had they asked me, this is a great ceiling to hang sculpture, I would have brought things in. I think this is a space that would handle especially my work very, very well, the 3-D work. It happens that it was made a prints and drawings show. Printmaking is not a change of heart at all—it’s always been part of what I do.

Telling Tales
I am at war with the Chelsea motif of one work with 20 feet of blank space on either side of it, lit well. What I do is a mix between salon and whatever. I tell stories. Once a print is sold, the story line goes away and it becomes a single object. When I put them back together, I can put a narrative (or a false narrative) together. The black-and-white wall over there, that’s a little road trip…images in the car, going to my friend Jane Rosen’s house in California. The second one above is my old studio in Kingston, and the ride in my little rubber boat to the lighthouse…it’s called Naaimachinemuziek, which means “sewing machine music” in Dutch, and it’s a term the Dutch might use to describe the little putt-putt motor in the boat; Kingston was a Dutch city, so everything has, like, 20 layers, which are not interesting, except to me, but I need it to get into each thing. There’s a thread of my experience that runs through it…but it’s not necessary for the viewer to know all that. You might think, why is she lumping these things together? Even not knowing the story in my head, I think you can get a feel for the sensibility, there is a particular touch. Everything has meaning for me. All these images are full of nostalgia and memories for me, so there’s a whole insider story. But every artist has that. Some people really like to tell the story, with wall text explaining everything, but I’d rather have [the works] exist by themselves.

Learning by Making Art
If I don’t learn something doing a show, if there isn’t a new motif, a new ingredient, a new set of techniques, I would stop. I’m a bad learner. I was a bad student. I hate books, I hate reports, I hate authority. I’m really a little feral in that way. So for me, I realized a long time ago that making art is a way I teach myself. So if I want to know about Japanese prints, or Victorian building, or the landscape, I’ll just immerse myself in that. It’s like reading a book I forgot to read growing up. A new show is a chance to have a new thing to think about. The installation in Houston is very involved with the weather, because every time I think of Texas, all I think about is terrible storms, terrible politics. It was like: Great, we can do tornadoes, and for me it can be a sort of political metaphor.