Grace Bentley-Scheck

The philosopher, Gaston Bachelard said that buildings reverberate through time.  Architecture, created by humans, is caught in the human cycle of birth, decay, and regeneration.  Some buildings, like the Old State House in Boston, become stages for momentous events.  Later generations seek to experience these sites of cultural seachanges.  Other buildings shelter ordinary family or business activities and slowly adapt to social change and the natural aging process.  In urban centers, such buildings often grow out of the debris of earlier cultures or stand next to buildings preserved from an earlier time.  When the bulldozer breaks the ground of a city lot, it opens it to the future while excavating the past.

For many years, my works have dealt with architecture as space humans enclose which becomes dynamic via its passage through time.  The process of building a collagraph plate layer by layer, much as time and the elements have created the subject, and the marks that result from the printing process provide an evocative medium through which structural changes, layers of painted advertising or graffiti, weathered surfaces, slight shifts in color, or play of light and shadow become visual symbols expressive of an intersection of time and space.