Mary Robinson is an artist based in Columbia, South Carolina. She is a Professor of Art and coordinates the Printmaking Program at the University of South Carolina School of Visual Art and Design. She received a BFA in Art from the University of Colorado, an MA in Art History from the University of Wisconsin, and an MFA in Printmaking from Indiana University. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as in Australia, Europe and Asia. She has attended residencies in Belgium, Finland and the U.S., and was invited to be a Resident Artist at the Hong Kong Graphic Arts Festival. Robinson’s awards include a USC Provost Grant to work in Finland and Japan, a Fulbright-Hayes Study Abroad Project in Korea, a USC CAS Research Initiative Grant, a USC Provost Grant for her project with fabric titled Regeneration, and the Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award at USC. Other recent projects include travelling to Norway and creating handmade books for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault; a community project permanently installed in the Richland County Wheatley Library; solo exhibitions at the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka, California and the Western Colorado Center for the Arts; and inclusion in Pressing Voices at the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC. Artist Statement: My work is deeply inspired by natural forms, particularly the branching systems of trees, roots, rivers and human arteries, as well as the elaborate chaos of tangled vines. I observe complex patterns of flowing, twisting fibers, and nature’s mode of creating variety within repetition. I use contrasting gestures of weaving together and breaking apart to relay my experience of existence—from conveying the pulse of nature to mirroring humans’ capacity for creation and destruction. I allow forms to travel, repeat, smother, tangle, and break in an attempt to express the mix of awe, reverence, anxiety and hope I feel living on Earth in the Twenty-First Century. By mixing and remixing printmaking matrices, as well as cutting up and reconfiguring paintings and drawings, I try to disorient the viewer and myself in order to see relationships freshly. This continual composing, decomposing, and recomposing is also a reflection of the way I experience the world where circumstances can change quickly—technology is developing rapidly, political situations can suddenly flip, and the natural environment is breaking down at an alarming pace.