Why or how did you get into this field?  What do you hope to do with your work?

Holly: I have always been creative, recently I was going through all my old report cards from grade school. every single report card said the same thing. Satisfactory grades in  everything but Art and Drama. I always had top marks in the arts. so when it came time for me to think about a career I didn’t really have a hard time deciding what direction I wanted to go in. As long as I’m being creative. I enjoy working with my hands and hope one day to do more sewing and sculpting. I love toy making and costumes, so I have been pointing myself more in that direction lately.

Sean:  I was pulled in by necessity. I was asked to illustrate Swill, and after I used up my old work, I had to do new work that was both presentable and quick to produce. I’d always thought of myself as primarily a draftsman, but the time constraints made it impossible for me to use an illustrative approach. I turned to photographs and scans, figuring it would be easy enough to generate quick compositions.

It didn’t work out that way. Rather than filling pages, I found myself emotionally invested in the images. I wasn’t just illustrating; I’d graduated to something I regard as real art. The followup series to The Bonelands, Seven Views of the Downtown Area, includes much less skeletal imagery, but contains a much richer level of interior content.

I’m tentatively exploring the fine arts scene. I’ve been in a couple of shows, talked to a couple of gallery owners. My goal is to produce one show from the art previously done for Swill.

Then I want to try and work outside the range of traditional printmaking. I want to use my prints as the basis for work that borders on the sculptural. I work digitally. I don’t own a color printer, so I rarely print my work. When I do? It’s exciting, but the print feels too small or limited, too flimsy, too cheap to feel like ‘real’ art to me. It’s not like working with a press and plates; a machine does all the work.

I want to do something more substantial. More like ‘real’ art. My current works are rendered as vector rather than raster images, so they can be outputted at any given size without loss of resolution. The images could be fed into laser cutters, or printed onto slabs of Lucite, or used as templates for molding concrete. This is extremely tentative, and I don’t know enough about the real-world possibilities to make serious plans. we shall see.

And earlier, I hinted at something important to me. I think I’ve figured out what it is that’s important to me in art, and how it relates to current theories of cognition. I think the experience I value in art comes down to complex and meaningful patterns of neurological activity, and I do know that my work has improved as a result of attempting to simultaneously trigger multiple brain centers in the reader or viewer. There’s something about the trifecta of evoking a memory, an emotion, and a sensory stimulus that seems particularly effective… I would dearly love to see if it is possible for me to do this predictably – and that would mean doing actual research with actual scientists. again, at this stage of my career, this sounds a bit like hubris.