I am intrigued and humbled by the elaborate designs of structures and forms. I travel a slender line as it spins into a web, grows into a complex system of arteries and veins, or knots itself into a tangle of grasses or tumbleweed. I yearn to go deeper into the labyrinth, explore the twists and turns of its passages, contemplate its shapes and hollows, penetrate and reveal its secrets.
This is how I find my way in. I begin by constructing a small facsimile of the object, in this body of work, tangled grasses. I select a single image from several drawings, etch it onto a copper plate, carve it into a block of wood, ink it up and make a proof. Then the questions begin. How can I take this fixed image and make it whole, help it breathe, give it life? How can I relive that sense of marvel which compelled me to begin this process? I don’t have answers yet, but this is what I do know. It will be a very long process. I will spend countless hours cutting, assembling, printing and attaching portions of images to one another. I will make wrong turns, encounter dead ends, and have more questions. But sometimes amazing things will happen. An unrealized transformation will appear as I shift one image over another, or a tangle of lines will become a spinning vortex as one layer is built upon another. The state of that first drawing, once fixed and static on a copper plate possesses the possibility of becoming new, unknown, and wondrous.
A native of Boston, MA, Roberta Allen has exhibited her work—paintings, drawings, prints, collages, and mixed media—in numerous group and solo shows, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Plains Art Museum, University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin and many other universities, art centers and galleries throughout the country. A graduate in studio arts and art history from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she also earned a B.S. Degree in Art Education from Tufts University and did post graduate independent study at the Museum School. She was recipient of an artist assistance fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, was a finalist for a fellowship from the Massachusetts Council for the Arts, and her work is in numerous private collections. Since moving to Minneapolis in 1995, she has become an active member of Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a cooperative of Twin Cities printmakers.