Ramsey has been making zines since 2004 when she discovered a love of minicomics through Snakepit, Jeffrey Brown, Nicole Georges, and Clutch.
She has since published two books, Year One and Little Fish (Zest Books) and has illustrated two others, Daisy to the Rescue by Jeff Campbell (Zest Books) and GIRL: Love, Sex, Romance and Being You by Karen Rayne (Magination Press.)
My artwork is the result of how I best communicate with others and myself. Thoughts and feelings are free-flowing and forming; they cannot be contained or organized, they are hard to control because their nature is transitory. One minute they are present and concrete, and then they pass. I aim to abstract reality, process it, and return it to something tangible.
Associate Publisher of Art in Print
My prints and drawings seek to challenge normative readings of the culturally and scientifically constituted body through the use of text. This body is a body that is complete and never changing, a body that is individual and closed, a body that is readable, and a body known through sight. These ideas are constructed by ideological structures such as language and objectivity, as well as cultural institutions like hospitals. In my work, I don’t seek to denounce these ideological structures and institutions (as my relationship to them is one of necessity) but rather to suggest ways of rethinking the constructed body that are more beneficial to, and understanding of, bodies that don’t fit into these norms.
I utilize processes of drawing and printmaking, such as copper plate etching, monotype, lithography, and artists’ books. These printmaking methods produce textures and marks that are very bodily, specifically the printed mark acting as an image relating to scarring, rubbing, or touching. My work utilizes the appropriation of medical imagery, such as dermatology textbook figures and diagrams of the body contrasted against textural mark-making. I also contrast forms of writing such as indexes and clinical documents with personal and theoretical writing that explores my own relationship to illness as well as themes of how the patient body is written and recorded.
Image: Constant, Immediate, Benjamin Merritt, Etching, monoprint, 2019-2020
Sam Hensley is a printmaker, storyteller and sculptor from Kentucky. She mends together tales of endearing yet unsettling creatures of varying sentience. Nursing the emotion between disgust and affection for things that cannot be understood, she reflects her own experiences with mental illness and feeling misshapen in your habitat. The telling of these stories is further aided by animatronic puppets that she constructs as vessels for her tragically friendly beings. She recently received her BFA from the University of Kentucky.
