Alison Saar. Translating Sculpture to Print

Alison Saar, Delta Doo, 2002. Monoprint, woodcut, and chine collé, 33 7/8 x 24 3/8 inches.

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“I’m a sculptor,” Alison Saar boldly states,¹ though her art making encompasses various materials and mediums, including printmaking. Far from a preliminary practice, Saar’s prints reimagine her completed sculptures,² and, as such, often depict solitary female figures reminiscent of Greek mythology and African deities and feature gestural marks typical of German Expressionism. “Being a sculptor,” says Saar, “I’m always . . . feeling the pull between the flatness of paper and wanting things to be more dimensional.”³ Employing the same visual strategies she uses in her sculptures, Saar often incorporates found objects and materials into the printmaking process, using discarded floor linoleum and pieces of wood as etching blocks. She plays with surface texture through techniques like collage, gluing pieces of found fabric to the print’s surface, and chine collé—for example, each of the bottles in Delta Doo (2002) is individually cut and bonded to the paper, creating a ghostly transparent effect. For Saar, printmaking is intuitive—she grew up watching her mother, the artist Betye Saar, study printmaking at California State University at Long Beach⁴—and has an immediacy that incites the artist’s experimental approach to making.