Crossing Between: Impressions of Community

Presented as part of Month of Printmaking, Crossing Between expands the language of print beyond ink on paper, tracing the medium’s core principles of pressure, repetition, layering, and transfer across print, weaving and sculpture. Printmaking depends on the relationship between surface and ground, source and impression, individual and collective. In this exhibition, that relational structure becomes a lens for considering how communities are built, supported, and defined.

Etta Sandry treats weaving as both image and structure. Using hand manipulated lace as stamp and stencil, she layers monotype prints through repetition and variation, building compositions as cloth is built, strand crossing strand. Architectural forms such as fences, windows, and gates emerge within these prints, pointing to the ways grids organize space and define thresholds. Select lace works are shown alongside the prints as generative sources, revealing how pattern shifts from textile to printed surface and back again. In returning printed forms to dimensional weaving, Sandry softens the rigidity of the grid and asks what happens when a boundary becomes permeable.

Anna Valenti extends this structural language into physical space. Inspired by trellises, pergolas, and woven vessels, her hanging and freestanding sculptures echo the geometry of lattices and screens. Constructed from fiber clay and hemplime, materials associated with shelter and environmental repair, her open frameworks emphasize support rather than enclosure. A trellis does not seal off space; it invites growth through it. Valenti’s work proposes that structure can cultivate connection rather than restrict it.

Keith Buswell’s prints foreground the communal nature of the medium itself. His arboreal portraits reference the subterranean fungal networks that allow trees to exchange nutrients and information — an ecological model of shared resources and collective survival. His works operate like an edition: each image distinct, yet defined by its relationship to others. The tactile framing elements evoke both root systems and the fibers of paper, reinforcing printmaking’s material and metaphorical networks.

Across the exhibition, the grid becomes trellis, lace becomes printed impression, and root systems mirror the fibers of paper. Structures can divide, but they can also sustain. The distinction lies in permeability, in whether a framework acts as a barrier or as a support.

Crossing Between suggests that printmaking is not only a method of image making but a model for understanding connection. What holds us apart and what holds us together often share the same underlying structure.