Both my studio and publishing practices move between solitude and togetherness. Making is a form of processing and feeling less alone. But it is the relationships and collaborations that come in waves and are among the most meaningful parts of life.

My studio practice is rigorous, largely analog, and performed in solitude. I make layered sewings, paintings, and works on paper that blur the distinctions between figure and ground through the application or extrusion of patterns such as stripes, checks, polka dots. I’m really interested in how different logics of the patterns meet at the lines of the original drawing and create a more abstracted image. Color systems and scale are used to further obscure the figure and change the reading at different distances. My source material includes film stills, advertising, family archive, and personal photography, with a particular attention to how figures relate to one another, the setting, and clothing. Through hand crafted methods, I’m interested in how these works simultaneously describe, obscure, flatten, and blend the figures within the scene.

The work draws from my interest in gender as something constructed through images, relationships, and performance. Influenced by 20th- and 21st-century visual culture, fashion, and cinema, I consider how gender identity is absorbed and repeated through everyday imagery and behavior. An important undercurrent in my work is grief. My mother died when I was 23 from ovarian cancer. We were very close, and she was the biggest supporter of my art. My research is informed by my German and French paternal ancestry, and my British maternal ancestry and family’s histories as thirteen generation Americans. I consider how gender expression intersects with representation, consumer capitalism, grief, and celebrity.

My publishing practice is also slow and attentive, resulting in a handmade book art magazine release every two years with images and information about artist and writers work. This work is collaborative, where I’m interested in using handmade book arts techniques to add further meaning to people’s work to share it with people in an accessible and unique way. Through both of these practices my hope is to create meaning for both myself and the viewer.

Ray Seebeck is an artist and publisher based in the Detroit, Michigan area. They received a BFA in Print Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. Their early work focused on experimental drawing and book arts. In 2021, while living in New York, they founded Magazine TM, an independent biennial art magazine highlighting artists through handmade book arts, now in its third release. From 2022–2025, while working at Free Range in Chicago, they produced over 50 woodcut prints mostly exploring landscapes, along with two magazine editions. Currently, they teach printmaking workshops at Signal-Return in Detroit while pursuing an MFA in Print Media at Cranbrook focusing on blurring the lines between figure and ground relationship in print based works, performance, and installation.