Hannah Eller

Artist Statement:

                I created this series in grief and I am taking it out in rage. This art was meant to make a statement about how divorce can affect someone's life, how the loss of structure in a family dynamic can change a person and no matter how old you are, your parents actions will still affect your life. Now this body of work demonstrates the devastation that a global pandemic and shut down does to our lives. This body of work will never have just one meaning but it won't have the chance to change again either. These prints before you are going to vanish faster than it was created and slower than the moments our lives are turned upside down. 

 

                People in the years to come will look at what we’ve created today and see what this virus has done to us and how it changed our lives. This virus has taken from those like me, our last few months of college, our graduation ceremony, and an even smaller percentage of us, our senior exhibition. 

 

                 As we go through our lives we are always told what to do, when to do it, how to do it, then expected to explain WHY we do it. I spent my first year doing what was expected of me as a student but learned to start pushing the boundaries of what art is and who I am as an artist. Up until my last year of college, I really had no emotion as to why I created art. 

 

                 During the semester before my show I started planning my exhibition. I wanted the process to be more valued than the product itself. I have changed these last couple years as a person and more so an artist, I started valuing the process over the product. 

 

                 I started my last year of college with a plan for my show, a show that would exhibit the devastation that I felt after my parents' separation. I spent that semester starting many different pieces but not finishing any of them because I felt like it wasn’t enough.  I decided I would use the images from my first plan and create drypoint etchings of them. This is a method of printmaking that I am experienced in and the process of making the prints is more important than the prints themselves.

These five images were chosen because they represent the anger, depression, grief, and acceptance of what was happening around me. As I carved these images I enhanced my mark making to show the raw emotions behind the picture. When I inked the plates, I left patches of ink behind to “shield” me from being noticed and used turpenoid to “erase” parts of me I wanted to forget. I planned to display over a hundred prints in the gallery to show how the anger inside me had taken over. 

                  I had the perfect show planned out but now I am showing you what happens when plans fall apart, when families go their separate ways, and when the world shuts down around us. This series will never hang in a gallery, these prints will never be bought, and our lives will never be the same. 

 

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, from ashes you are, to dust you shall return.” 

Genesis 3:19