This series of works on paper uses traditional printing processes (etching with copper plates) based on 16” and 6” wafers. An engineer may be able to see that I have expanded the circuitry on the 6” wafers and maintained the original size of the 16” wafer - so these designs exist only in a theoretical way. With color field artists in mind, I selected colors that would make the four separate layers move back and forth in front of the viewer’s eye, merging and then becoming distinct again.

In addition to the color play, I am very conscious of the use of wafers as metaphors of memory - extended human memory - a sixth sense in a four dimensional world. The squares, the boxes, the lines, the ‘x’s, the hatchings, etc., are what the silicon world users refer to as interconnect modules. But these are metaphors for meetings, passages, doorways to new events, experiences, and different emotional states.

The four prints in this series are titled as follows:
95 46 54 92 (Blue)
92 95 46 54 (Green)
54 92 95 46 (Orange)
46 54 92 95 (Red)

They refer to years of birth in my immediate family. Imagine each wafer, now a copper plate, representing a person, and how we move individually through life, but in a tapestry as a family. The interconnects are births, deaths, marriages, and separations.

I like using the wafers for several reasons. I find them rich in nuance and metaphor. This is the fourth series of prints using wafers. In the first set of 9 prints, I used 6” wafers, that included drawn and etched objects or profiles blurring the lines on the wafer. The second set was a trilogy of 6” wafers and copper plates also using symbolic drawings. The third set used documents and photos - about 90 in all, in which the wafers are a metaphor for organized data: chemical formulae, architectural drawings, and DNA coding in the tree and plant world, as examples. The wafers are a metaphor for printouts, a new voice for data as it is sorted, matched, summarized, and presented.