Behind the Prints: My Process and Thoughts on the New Collection

Anna going through her new collection of mono screen prints.

Beginning in vermont

This new body of work began quietly—just the way these rooms exist.

The first pieces emerged during my time at Vermont Studio Center, where long days in the print shop and quiet nights in the studio offered the stillness I needed to listen closely for a new direction. I didn’t fully know what I was making at first—only that I kept returning to the idea of a room: not any one room, but the sensation of being in a space that felt both remembered and invented. A space that was familiar but unplaceable.

I kept thinking about all the old buildings in the River Arts District that once housed our creative homes before Hurricane Helene claimed them—how many lives a single space can hold, the layers of history etched into their walls. I thought about all the people who came before, and what will come after; about the quiet pause in the life of a space, when it sits empty in the time after destruction and before what’s next.

Framed prints from Echo of a Room that was Never Real.

continuing that work at home

Since returning home, I’ve continued building this series, pushing deeper into the imagery and refining a this new mono printing technique that I began exploring in Vermont. Each work in the collection is created through a slow, layered process: I build up inks directly on the mesh screen, blending lighter and darker shades within a single color field to create a sense of light and depth. I experiment with viscosity, transparency, and the sequencing of colors—allowing chance and control to meet at the surface.

When everything feels right, I pull a single print from the screen—one sweep of the squeegee, capturing every decision, every layer, all at once. Each piece is one-of-a-kind.

Anna experimenting with mono screen printing at Print House, Asheville NC.

giving the rooms a voice

This collection has been a process of listening—of slowing down enough to tune into ambiguity and let it guide the work. Something shifted in my practice while at residency: what began as daily journaling gradually turned into something closer to creative writing. For the first time, the writing was leading the visual direction.

As I built each image, the words kept arriving. While ink dried and screens were cleaned, paragraphs formed in the background of my mind. The writing felt insistent, like it wanted to be seen too. It only felt fair to give those thoughts a voice. That’s where the written piece accompanying this collection came from—not as a secondary explanation, but as part of the work itself. Both the prints and the writing hold the same atmosphere, speak in the same register. They belong to one another.

These rooms exist somewhere between memory and invention, weathered interiors that refuse to settle into certainty. Each space is a holding place, a container for what came before and what might follow. They bear the quiet scars of past storms—windows that have watched generations come and gone, doors opened and closed too many times to count.

Maybe they’re only an echo of themselves, half-erased, half-rebuilt. A room waiting for someone to return—or for no one at all. Time feels suspended here. The air hums with silent uncertainty. Where is this room? What lies beyond it?

They’ve been emptied before. They’ll be filled again.

Each space carries the weight of history and the quiet dread of repetition—how rooms, like bodies, like nations, endure destruction, occupation, reclamation, loss. And still, they hold. They persist, even as their edges blur, surfaces dissolve, and light bends against the walls in unfamiliar ways. There is a dissonance in these rooms: between what is remembered and what is imagined, between shelter and abandonment, between ruin and repair.

We are all moving through a dream we did not choose, caught between doors that lead somewhere—or nowhere. These rooms ask: what remains after collapse? What invisible histories linger in the walls? How many times can a space be rebuilt?”

I hope these prints offer you a space to linger, to reflect, and maybe to recognize something familiar in their uncertainty.