Artists’ Proof

Curated by H Schenck

Juniper Darling

Graphic Impressions
5
Artists
5
Exhibition Artists
5
Juniper Darling

About the Artist

Juniper Darling is a visual artist based in Chicago. They attend Columbia College, where they are a rising senior BFA student. Darling graduated high school from Perpich Center for Arts Education in Minnesota, where they majored in Fine Arts with a focus in printmaking under Jeremy Lundquist. Darling makes work primarily of themself and their partner of five years, Leo Darling. Their work explores queerness as a space of joy and love, not to ignore the hardships within queer life, but to heal from them.

Artist:

Juniper Darling

Social media: @junebdarling

Website: www.junedarling.com

Exhibition

Artists’ Proof

Artist Statement

I am an artist who works with print, paper, craft, and gouache. I aim to depict the everyday moments of my life, primarily focused on love, death, and nature. As a trans and nonbinary artist, I find it important to depict the trans body in moments of romance and intimacy. For me, being trans in itself is traumatic and full of tension. I work to release this trauma through my work by depicting the trans body as loved, softly and wholly. I find that it is my connection to nature, to the cycles of death and rebirth, that grounds my work as a form of healing. My vignettes are accompanied by my visual language of abstraction through shapes, embellishments, plants, and color. By abstracting the surroundings of my subject matter, I express the emotion of the moment. Because my work is a ground for self reflection and healing, I work with labor and time-intensive mediums. The act of making with my body is baked into the meaning of each piece, which is why printmaking is my main medium.

With print, I often draw and redraw each image, then trace onto my matrix and burn or carve or etch the image. Then, I pick paper colors and ink colors and vary each print as I choose. This time spent with my work, the physicality of its making, expands the work from a singular flat image into an array of variations, each with its own weight. I find the time spent to make a print meditative and reflective, which echoes the way each piece holds a memory expanded with meaning. While printmaking is not my first medium, it is my first love, and the basis on which I make all other works. My print practice can be seen in my paintings and embroideries in my use of flat shapes, my sense of composition and layering, and the choice of media that require labor, time, and repetition.