Handmade paper with inked snake shed, 2022

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I adopted Moony Bones from a woman in Lancaster. We met in the parking lot of Aldi and she gave me nameless one-year-old Moony, a thin lavender corn snake. Moony became my muse, and when I went to Rome to study printmaking, I brought one of her most intact sheds. I was so precious about it, held it with such revere, how its translucent iradescence glistened in the cold studio lights, how it felt like tissue paper. When I finally decided to use it in a work, I wanted to make it count. So I made a rubbing of the shed, I made a monotype of it with black ink and then white, I made ghost prints of each monotype, I covered the shed in ink itself and printed it in various configurations across various papers. Finally, when I was surrounded by prints of Moony, I looked at the shed in my hands and found it limp, oily, and tattered.