Sally Chapman is a Lowell-based artist who gravitates toward tactile methods of printing and shaping her photographic work. She will be presenting 25 of her framed pieces from the series Mythic Nature along with her sculpted artist books and boxes at the Concord Library Gallery May 3 through May 30.
A hands-on experience with the artist books will be held Saturday, May 20 from 2-4 p.m.
In Mythic Nature, she creates imaginary worlds by decoupling statuary from their stark plinths and recontextualizing them within landscapes created from formal gardens, farmlands, and watery hideaways. She then prints the resulting imagery with cyanotype, a 19th century process, and further adds her hand to the final works by drawing and hand-coloring them with pastels.
The artist books move her photography into sculptural pieces that transform as the piece is unfolded or opened. Some of the pieces are inspired by her imagery and the shape evolves from that idea. Others may start with a given shape such as a wooden block or a cigar box, and the imagery is sculpted, cut, and folded around that shape.
