Shireen Holman
Book Artist & Printmaker

A Child's World

When my daughters were young, I made a series of monotypes depicting the inner perspective of a small child as she encounters the fear, mystery, and wonder of the growing world within and outside herself. Her relationship to this enormous space and complexity, as it both beckons and frightens, serves as a metaphor for all of us, in our relationships to fear, mystery and wonder. I worked on the idea of different levels of consciousness and awareness, using different levels of physical space. I used windows and doors to suggest inner and outer worlds, inner and outer spaces. In some of my prints, images of monsters or mysterious creatures suggest the content of awareness; in others I sought the sense of an invisible presence that the viewer knows the child can see or feel.