My recent printed works are multiple plate intaglio, monoprint, and gum transfer combinations. This series of work was created in my studio in  Harper’s Ferry, in a space which once housed a Civil War Hospital.  Being there has influenced this body of work, more than any other studio I have worked in. Harper’s Ferry is a formidable place of power and ingenuity, even if it is mostly a museum now.  People still drown in the rapids there. With its bloody and revolutionary history and wild floods, Harper’s Ferry, to me, represents the intersection of the best and worst in both nature and humanity.

I am interested in the ways in which we experience the past through our senses but without directness. In Harper’s Ferry, the stone steps I walk on every week  were stained with blood for years; after Antietam, so many wounded men were packed into the Catholic Church up the hill that a “river of Blood” flowed down the steps to the street below. I find it difficult not to think about the past in a place like that. Being there has made me even more aware of the unseen but still perceivable feeling of emotional history; of “tasting”, but not seeing, the ghost.

Maybe the phenomena of ghosts personifies our own deep need to continue assimilating what the dead communicated in life; like a work of art, there is relevant communication beyond time and place.  For me, the process of making art is also like this; it is never direct, and informs me long after the time it leaves my hands.

                                                                       -Heather Self