I work across the boundaries of drawing, printmaking and textiles to make collages and soft sculptures that explore concepts of home, play, reality, and authenticity. Referencing source material suggestive of domestic interiors– vintage wallpapers, textile patterns, ornamental architecture, I use a RISO duplicator to create patterns and symbols that I flip, shift and reconfigure. The resulting compositions, reminiscent of quilts, become artifacts celebrating handicraft traditions while simultaneously destabilizing assumptions about the handmade versus the mechanical.
Most of my work involves risograph, a process that is a sort of cross between a screenprint and an offset lithograph all housed within a xerox-like machine. Now outdated technology, risograph duplicators were once widely used in schools and church presses. I use print processes like this as a means of blurring the distinction between handmade, digital, and mechanical space, and playing with a sense of material transformation. I hand-draw quilt squares and stitches, print them in hyper-saturated colors on handmade papers and fabric, and then collage and sew them. A textile becomes a drawing, becomes a print, becomes a textile again in an ongoing cycle of media transference.
This tension between the handcrafted and the machine-made is central to my work. I revel in the moments of “glitch” where the perfect replication of the digital world breaks down, introducing happy accidents and irregularities. Ultimately, I seek to create works that offer playful yet rigorous exploration of materiality and process while challenging traditional hierarchies of art-making.
Jacquelyn Strycker is a Brooklyn-based artist working in painting, printmaking, collage and fibers-based media. She is concerned with the relationship between decoration and function, and invested in material exploration and handicraft.