Cavity by Caleb Booth

My work emerges from a Christian understanding of the world as both material and spiritual. I am drawn to the tension between what is seen and what is unseen: the physical world of flesh, bone, objects, and landscape, and the immaterial life of soul, conscience, memory, desire, and spirit. I see the fingerprint of God in this tension, and my work is a way of looking closely at it. I work across mediums, allowing the ideas and images themselves to determine the form they need to take. Printmaking is one part of that broader practice. It gives me a place to experiment materially, to test and develop images, and to carry those discoveries into other work. I make monotypes, plexi engravings, and other experimental prints. At times, I treat the print as a starting place rather than a finished object, layering, cutting, rearranging, and collaging impressions together. I am interested in the physical qualities of the process: the pressure of the press, the transparency and density of ink, the texture of a surface, and the unexpected shifts that occur when an image is transferred. These things leave behind evidence of touch, resistance, revision, and change. I often work through symbols, building a visual vocabulary that is particular to my own practice. Familiar forms and materials offer viewers a way into the work, while their combinations and altered contexts leave room for ambiguity. I want the work to be well made and visually compelling, but also strange enough to create questions rather than simply resolve them. Printmaking supports this larger vision by making visible the distance between what is intended and what is revealed. The image is made in one place but does not fully come into view until it is pulled. That gap reflects the concerns at the center of my work: what I see and what I feel, what I know and what I am still discovering. The resulting prints are artifacts of that search—material witnesses to faith, mystery, and the belief that the visible world holds more than it first appears to contain.