Floating by Ten

June Claire Wayne

By 1978 June Claire Wayne had been working in lithography for 30 years and had founded, operated, and retired from the Tamarind Workshop, establishing herself as a leading pioneer of experimental lithography known the world over. Now, she was able to focus on developing a variety of series that meditated on her personal politics, the notion of identity and privacy, and her personal studies in DNA, tidal forces, and physics.

In this same year, she had nearly completed her semi-biographical set of 20 lithographs dedicated to the life of her mother, the Dorothy Series, as well as the Visa Series, which explored self-identity through the image of the fingerprint. Interspersed throughout these works were her interpretations of macro and micro theoretical physics. "Floating by Ten" inadvertantly acts as a culmination of these subjects: the shapes found "floating" in a square of pale blue could at once be a depiction of late evening clouds marching across the sky, or a fingerprint or other minute biological occurance seen under a microscope.

A quote from Wayne in Conway, on the page for "Floating..." reads: "In these cosmic images I started using the convention of field and a detail, in this case enormously enlarged, a little tiny fragment, enlarged and simplified, until it becomes a kind of calligraphy."