Retired Hatch Show Print Master Printer Jim Sherraden will exhibit new work including his intimate and detailed paper quilts alongside monoprints created during his tenure at HSP using the historic HSP archive of wooden blocks in unique and inventive ways.

Master Printer Emeritus Jim Sherraden will exhibit new work in Hatch Show Print’s Haley Gallery, including a return to his series of monoprint pieces that focus on and feature attributes of the shop’s collection, as well as a selection of paper quilts that come from his current body of work.

Jim Sherraden walked into Hatch Show Print in 1984 and didn’t walk out for 34 years. In that period he and his staff oversaw the shop’s transition from a cultural survivor, and technological curiosity, into the world renowned icon of American design and destination for letterpress enthusiasts that it is today.

In the 1990s, Sherraden began a body of work, “monoprints,” that are contemporary interpretations of the shop’s vast collection of advertising woodblocks, sometimes combined with movable type.

Always impressed with “the delicate nature by which Mr. Hatch designed the eyes of all the entertainers,” Sherraden decided to celebrate these features by re-carving and printing a considerable number of them, building collages that organized all of the focused prints into fields of “Hatch Eyes.” Those led to the next obvious feature, the “Hatch Mouths,” and finally, the “Shoes of Hatch.” All of the printing blocks were carved from linoleum or Japanese Shina plywood. Hundreds of single, small prints made while Sherraden served as Master Printer, have been assembled especially for this show.

Also on display are works Sherraden has named “paper quilts,” that are richly detailed traditional and abstract designs based on his own woodcuts. Presented side-by-side with the re-interpretations of the famous faces and feet of the shop’s clients from the last century, the artworks’ complementary foundations of color, contrast, repetitive imagery, and symmetry present a visual feast.

Jim Sherraden’s quilts have recently been shown at Anderson University in South Carolina, the AD 20/21 Boston Print Fair, the Lancaster, PA Letterpress Printers Fair, and From Brayer to Brush at the Southern Studies Conference at Auburn University, Montgomery. He was awarded the 2013 Distinguished Artists Award for the state of Tennessee, the American Advertising Federation Nashville chapters’ Silver Medal, and is a recent recipient of the University and College Design Association’s Krider Prize for creativity.