"I grew up on a small hobby farm with chickens, sheep, horses, ponies, rabbits, geese, dogs, and cats, and was allowed to have every animal I wanted as long as I did my chores. The time and labor required in keeping horses often comes to mind when I reflect on my choice of printmaking as an area of study. The process requires both physical and mental labor, and a lot of groundwork. Also, many of the memories and stories I use as source material when creating images go back to the time when my life was dedicated to the care of animals.

The prints are based on complex narratives which encompass the real and imagined, natural and cultural, historic and prehistoric. Many are based on stories I’ve known since I was young. Others are based on various lifelong fascinations involving everything from buried things to igloos to real and imagined monsters. A major theme in my work is the progression of living things through time and space and the environmental imprints they leave behind. Orchards and furrowed fields represent the vital link between human civilization and the natural cycle of the seasons; birth, harvest, and death. Agricultural images incorporate the death theme within the context of the cycle. Death is impermanent as the next generation has already been sown. Fossil imagery represents a decidedly permanent death, or extinction, not only of living things, but of thoughts, ideas, and stories.

I almost always draw from memory, imagination and dreams. Other source material comes from literature. The multiplicity and mutability of the print make it ideal for the creation of a menagerie of images that can be combined and overlapped to build visual narratives and tell stories. I intend to tell my stories using this process of creating and combining printed images." -Meg Perec