Maggie Murphy
Greensboro, NC
www.Murphymaggie.com/art
IG: @legs_benedict

Four Questions for Tomorrow
2023
Risograph and letterpress on card stock with lasercut chipboard folder
5.5 x 1 x 7”

Artist Statement

In my practice as a printmaker, I pose discomfiting questions through which I strive to capture and communicate the vulnerability of my existential disquietude—whether ecological, metaphysical, personal, or otherwise. This body of work acts as an interlocutor, seeking to prompt reflection, contrition, and resolve in those who engage with it. Four Questions For Tomorrow, my first artist’s book, presents a series of questions I have about human adaptability to, and coping with, the climate crisis—questions that, because they scare me so much, I want to keep deferring until later and later. In other words, I’ll ask them tomorrow.

To create this work, I took a photographs of the sky and printed them on a riso machine using blue, yellow, and metallic gold inks. As these inks overlap, they create gradients that include shades of green. The effect is beautiful, but unnatural, echoing my questions about proposed methods of geoengineering that include injecting sulfur particles into the atmosphere to reflect back the sun’s heat, thereby cooling the earth. Then, I composed metal type by hand and printed the four questions on a tabletop proofing press. (The positioning of the questions on the cards varies across an edition of six books.) Finally, I designed and created a chipboard folder to house the cards using a laser cutter. Housing the cards in a folder, rather than binding them into book form, allows them to be rearranged and encountered in any order—and perhaps distributed to others, either to start new conversations or as a way to keep from having to contemplate the questions yourself any further.