Ellen Shattuck Pierce | Urban Toile, 2024
Linocut
Media Dimensions: 183 x 223.5 x 10.1 cm
Image Dimensions:
Edition of 10 (with unique variations)
Installation
**Ellen Shattuck Pierce is an artist and educator living in Boston, Massachusetts. She loves printmaking and its historical role in disseminating knowledge, its use as a decorative art, and its use as a medium for protest. She embraces all three of these aspects by using relief cuts to create allegorical scenes of American life in her printwork.** **I am drawn to the modest and traditional medium of printmaking but work to push beyond its formal boundaries. Relief carvings are the foundation of my custom wallpaper. My designs are based on 18th Century toile textiles which are the perfect world to express the duality of lived experience. The beatific scenes of leisure, wealth and endless happy days speak to the pursuit of happiness written into the US constitution and Americans' obsession with achieving the perfect life. Here, in Urban Toile, the repeating prints convey a more realistic view of the never-ending pattern of care work. Borrowing ideas from grotesques, I sculpt my view of contemporary parenting. American child-carrying prioritizes the child’s movements, is outward facing, complicated and often oversized. These two-headed, eight-limbed monsters show our culture’s obsession with centering the child.**
Linocut
Media Dimensions: 183 x 223.5 x 10.1 cm
Image Dimensions:
Edition of 10 (with unique variations)
Installation
**Ellen Shattuck Pierce is an artist and educator living in Boston, Massachusetts. She loves printmaking and its historical role in disseminating knowledge, its use as a decorative art, and its use as a medium for protest. She embraces all three of these aspects by using relief cuts to create allegorical scenes of American life in her printwork.** **I am drawn to the modest and traditional medium of printmaking but work to push beyond its formal boundaries. Relief carvings are the foundation of my custom wallpaper. My designs are based on 18th Century toile textiles which are the perfect world to express the duality of lived experience. The beatific scenes of leisure, wealth and endless happy days speak to the pursuit of happiness written into the US constitution and Americans' obsession with achieving the perfect life. Here, in Urban Toile, the repeating prints convey a more realistic view of the never-ending pattern of care work. Borrowing ideas from grotesques, I sculpt my view of contemporary parenting. American child-carrying prioritizes the child’s movements, is outward facing, complicated and often oversized. These two-headed, eight-limbed monsters show our culture’s obsession with centering the child.**
Linocut
Media Dimensions: 183 x 223.5 x 10.1 cm
Image Dimensions:
Edition of 10 (with unique variations)
Installation
**Ellen Shattuck Pierce is an artist and educator living in Boston, Massachusetts. She loves printmaking and its historical role in disseminating knowledge, its use as a decorative art, and its use as a medium for protest. She embraces all three of these aspects by using relief cuts to create allegorical scenes of American life in her printwork.** **I am drawn to the modest and traditional medium of printmaking but work to push beyond its formal boundaries. Relief carvings are the foundation of my custom wallpaper. My designs are based on 18th Century toile textiles which are the perfect world to express the duality of lived experience. The beatific scenes of leisure, wealth and endless happy days speak to the pursuit of happiness written into the US constitution and Americans' obsession with achieving the perfect life. Here, in Urban Toile, the repeating prints convey a more realistic view of the never-ending pattern of care work. Borrowing ideas from grotesques, I sculpt my view of contemporary parenting. American child-carrying prioritizes the child’s movements, is outward facing, complicated and often oversized. These two-headed, eight-limbed monsters show our culture’s obsession with centering the child.**
