Boston-based artist Ellen Shattuck Pierce combines relief cut, tinted cyanotype and embossing into a handprinted wallpaper that holds grief and renewal in the same frame, drawing on the cycles of winter to reckon with the hardest kind of year.
Winter has a particular quality of honesty. The burnt umber remains of flowers pushing through snow do not pretend that things are otherwise than they are. For Ellen Shattuck Pierce, walking in that quiet became a form of solace, and eventually a subject.
“I found solace walking in the quiet of winter and seeing the burnt umber remains of flowers poking out from under blankets of snow,” she says. “The deadened flowers served as an acknowledgment that things are hard but there is still life to come.”
Wintering Toile is a handprinted wallpaper installation measuring eight by five feet, combining relief cut, tinted cyanotype and embossing on BFK Rives. The work emerged from a year in which Pierce’s family was visited by diagnoses of Alzheimer’s, brain cancer and addiction. There is a directness in how she names this, and the wallpaper carries that same quality: it does not resolve the difficulty so much as hold it alongside something else. The fallow period of winter is depicted through cyanotypes of dried foliage, while carved flowers of rebirth press through from the relief cut. Grief and the possibility of what comes after occupy the same surface.
The cyanotype process required particular attention. Pierce did not want the traditional indigo blue, which would have pitched the work into something too cool and resolved for its subject. Instead she spent a year practicing bleaching and toning her cyanotypes to achieve the dark earth tones of dead winter, colours that sit closer to soil than sky. Combined with the tactile presence of relief cut and the subtle dimensional quality of embossing, the result is a surface with genuine weight, one where technique and subject reinforce each other rather than pulling apart.
Her approach to the wallpaper format itself is rooted in historical practice. Pierce’s work is informed by Toile de Jouy textile design and 18th century wallpaper manufacturing, and she employs the original process of seaming individual sheets together, a method that predates continuous paper rolls and that, crucially, opens the design to variation.
“Printing for me is about increasing the variations of an image and not about replication,” she explains. “It is incredibly satisfying to have an image and alter it multiple times, thereby generating new meanings.”
The toile pattern becomes a structure for thinking about cycles rather than a decorative convention, a way of using repetition to say something about what recurs and what does not.
The wallpaper format, the domestic scale, the pattern logic borrowed from textile history, all of it serves the work’s central argument: that the cycles of fallow and abundance, of loss and the slow return of light, are not exceptional but structural, woven into the fabric of living.
Ellen Shattuck Pierce is an artist and educator based in Boston, MA. Her practice spans relief cuts, books and wallpaper installations, using printmaking to engage with allegorical scenes of American life and the historical role of print in disseminating knowledge, decorative art and protest. Her work was awarded the Printmaking Today Prize at the 2024 Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London. She received a Visiting Artist Fellowship at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice in 2025 and has been invited to be an Artist in Residence at Kala Art Institute.
ARTIST LINKS
ellenshattuckpierce.com
@ellenshattuckpierce
Wintering Toile, 2026. Relief cut, tinted cyanotype and embossing on BFK Rives, 8 x 5 feet.
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