Artist Statement.

Ray Zill is a poet, printmaker, and photographer utilizing analog and alternative processes to create a sense of loss, longing, and letting go. Her work plays with the tangibility of print, inviting viewers to touch the work as part of the experience. Ray’s exploration of sight loss and print disabilities challenge traditional print matrices to create something new out of the familiar. She employs three-dimensional elements, braille, jumbled letters, and distorted imagery to convey the grief associated with losing one’s ability to read standard, printed text. Her work is both intimate and universally felt by anyone who has struggled with reading. A librarian by trade, much of Ray’s work ends up in book form.

Bio.

Born on a rainy day in San Diego, Ray spent her first four years on the West Coast before moving to Nebraska. Ray was a curious child, always asking questions and testing limits. Her inquisitive nature led her to challenge teachers in Catholic school and befriend an unlikely cast of characters and outcasts. Ray wrote poetry to escape bullying and loneliness. She wrote stories and developed characters to play her friends. In grade school, she stored her work on floppy disks and uploaded it to Myspace. In high school, she became fascinated with typewriters and zines. In college, she took her very first letterpress class.

Aiming to become a high school English teacher, Ray enrolled in the College of Education at University of Nebraska at Omaha. She eventually changed majors to library science, started a job at the university library, and studied letterpress printing and bookmaking with Bonnie O’Connell. Ray has many fond memories of walking from the library to the print studio, where she would spend late nights printing and binding her books. After graduation, Ray took a brief hiatus from printing to focus on her career in librarianship. After graduating with a master’s degree and moving to the West Coast, she took up printing again to process a major transition in her life: divorce. Ray moved to Olympia, Washington, bought her first press from Mare Blocker, and started a long-distance relationship with Community Print during the pandemic. Poet Ray Prints became her press name, redemption, and expression of her true, authentic self.

Ray received a Bachelor of Education from University of Nebraska at Omaha (2013), a Master of Arts in Information Science and Learning Technology from University of Missouri (2016), and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Print Media from Pacific Northwest College of Art (exp. 2025). Ray lives in Olympia, Washington, with Kyle (the human) and Marc (the cat). She is an organizing member and teacher at Community Print and an active member of Puget Sound Book Artists. She is a librarian at The Evergreen State College where, among many other things, she looks after a unique collection of artist books.

Contact.

Ray can be reached by email at poetrayprints@gmail.com.

Send her a letter at PO Box 5489 in Lacey, WA, 98509, USA.