Printmaking Professor Melissa Harshman and Ohio University professor Melissa Haviland will present the exhibition Growing Over at the IMPACT 12 International Printmaking Conference at The Centre for Print Research, at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK from September 21-25, 2022. IMPACT is the largest professional printmaking organization in Europe.

                             Artworks in “Growing Over”. (left) Melissa Haviland and (right) Melissa Harshman

Harshman and Haviland exploit the use of multiple, patterns, and domestic references to create larger installations with prints and paper. Growing Over uses floral references, print, and handmade paper to invite the viewer to contemplate repetition, density, pattern, colour, and our emotional reactions to flowers. 

Artist Bios

Melissa Harshman received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin- Madison in 1992. She has taught at the Lamar Dodd School of Art since 1993. Harshman has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. She was awarded a UGA Senior Faculty Research Grant in 2019 titled “Explorations in Papermaking”. She is one of the inaugural Art Lab Fellowship recipients from the University of Georgia for 2022/23. Her work was recently on display at the Hunderton Art Museum in Clinton, NJ in “Press +”. Upcoming exhibitions include “When Print meets Paper” at the Robert C. Williams Museum of papermaking in Atlanta, GA. She recently completed the Denbo Fellowship at Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center in Hyattsville, MD focusing on handmade paper. She will have work on display at the Impact 12 International Printmaking Conference in Bristol, England in September of 2022. Her work can be seen at http://melissaharshman.com.

Melissa Haviland is an artist who lives and works in Athens, Ohio. Haviland’s print installations take over the gallery, often becoming a bit too much. They are inspired by the economics of the objects and materials that build our everyday lives, evaluating them as totems and commodities. Haviland uses domestic objects as a cultural lens to explore relationships: personal and socio-political, evaluating Western culture’s colonial history and its effects on class divisions and struggles. Haviland’s artwork twines together screen print, handmade paper, pattern, and the multiple. She received a BFA from Illinois State University in 1998 and an MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2002. Currently, Haviland is a professor at Ohio University where she teaches printmaking and papermaking and is the chair of the print area and the director of study of the Honors Tutorial College Studio Art program. 

About Impact

IMPACT stands for ‘International Multi-disciplinary Printmaking, Artists, Concepts and Techniques’. Over the past two decades IMPACT has evolved as Europe’s leading academic discourse on printmaking.