As a little girl, Laura Pharis knew she was an artist, and with her mother's encouragement, she developed her interest into a lifetime occupation. She is currently Associate Professor of Studio Art at Sweet Briar College, where she specializes in teaching drawing and printmaking.

               Baby's House shows an infant the moment after birth held aloft by a man's hand. The child has just emerged from the uterus, its first home, and now is surrounded by the houses in the border -- in which home will the baby end up? The anxiety over one's destiny is expressed in the house of fire. The house shape is echoed throughout the print in the pentagons and maple leaves in the border.

               The inspiration for the image came from an unlikely source. While flipping through a science mail order catalog, Pharis spotted an advertisement for a model uterus with an attached fetus, used in teaching child delivery in emergency situations. Beside the large ad was a smaller image, that of a man's hand holding up a baby. Although the image was small, its impact on the artist was great.

               The use of blue, her favorite color, suggests water, space, and the sky. The four elements -- air, water, earth, and fire -- are represented in the corners of the print, and the house in the lower right-hand corner (representing earth) is similar to one in Nelson County which was one of her son's first homes.

               The artist's son's crayons influenced the original Baby's House print. Pharis used crayons to color the houses in the four corners. Computer scanning was used in the creation of the print shown in this exhibition, a version of the original print.

               The plate was created with water-based monoprint made by Createx. This medium allows the artist to work on a print making changes for up to nine months, where other types of printing only allow two hours of production time. Also used in the print was chine collé (a Chinese technique involving lamination and rice paper).

Prints