The Whisker Prints

Island Press at the Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis invited me for a printmaking residency. I had no experience with printmaking and regarded the invitation both enthusiastically and nervously: I had no clear plan for what I wanted to make during my week there. While I was packing my bags, I impulsively took along a small zip-top bag of cat whiskers. My cats shed them, and I had gotten into the habit of picking them up off the floor or rug and stashing them away.

The cat whiskers became the central element of the first print project I did there. Using tweezers, I placed my seventeen cat whiskers one at a time onto an acrylic plate inked with either black or blue ink, using them as stencils. When the print came out of the press, the places where the whiskers had been left a white whisker trace in its place. I carefully cleaned and wiped off each whisker and then started improvising the next print, challenged very time by having only a limited number of lines to work with.

While working with the whiskers and considering the way cats use them, I also thought about deep sea creatures like Anglerfish, who live in a lightless world and find their way around using perception other than vision. The Whisker Prints loosely resemble abyssal organisms: shadowy and barely known to us, navigating their environment with a wholly different kind of proprioception than our own.