Artist Statement

Diana Arterian

A couple of years ago I took a class that focused on the entirety of Blake’s work, his methods, his mythology, etc. My shorthand description of it was “All Blake, all the time.” We were supposed to read directly from his plates rather than the printed words at the back of the Blake tome. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, draining. Blake’s work is often wild and expansive. His script on his plates is often inscrutable. I guess I wanted to claim something from it.

These are from a chapbook entitled Songs of Innorience, which appropriates from Blake’s arguably tamest work, Songs of Innocence and Experience. In it I mash up and perform erasure upon those poems which seem to “speak” to each other – they have the same title, or address a similar idea. The images are from his plates and are done digitally. I have a deep desire to do these with physical materials, if I have the time.

 

.