Kent Cultural Alliance
Artist in Residence - Theme: Rivers

In partnership with ShoreRivers, KCA sponsored a six-week residency. During the first weeks artist received an intensive introduction to Chestertown, MD. We spent a day on a river with one of ShoreRivers’ Riverkeepers, toured Chestertown with a focus on the history and influences of the river on the community, learned about local ecology from ShoreRivers and Sultana Education Foundation staff at the Lawrence Wetlands Preserve, and visited conservation projects on a waterside farm dating back to the Colonial era.

Reviewed by By Mary McCoy, The Talbot Spy, Sept 3, 2024

“Stunningly complex and dynamic, her series of works created from paper hand-marbled in water from the Chester River woven together with vividly patterned stone lithography and linoleum block prints evoke the ever-changing ripples and waves, shadowed depths and sudden sparkling glints of light on a tidal river. Sometimes the weaving folds over on itself like a breaking wave or reveals a fringe of seaweed cut out of paper dangling down from behind, sometimes a shape appears—a heart or an enormous moth, a remnant of an image from one of the prints. It’s like watching a river flow—the more you look, the more you discover.

More gentle but hardly less complex, Lorenz’s row of hand-marbled cloths are graceful studies of the movements of wind and water. Working outdoors, mostly in Wilmer Park, Lorenz used the traditional Japanese suminagashi method of dabbing colored ink rhythmically onto water she had scooped from the river. As with her hand-marbled paper, she allowed the wind to swirl the ink into natural patterns, capturing the whirls of color by laying cotton cloths on the water’s surface. Multiple layers of marbling yielded bafflingly complex waves and whirlpools as intricate as the ripples, eddies and flow of the river itself.