To show virtue her own feature
Chelsea O'Byrne
To show virtue her own feature
Lithograph on handmade recycled newsprint, 2026
Chelsea O’Byrne, MFA Full-Residency 2026 cohort
This work is a large scale lithographic print on 25 sheets of handmade recycled newsprint, made from newspapers and other print media. It features stage directions taken from the climactic moments of many famous plays in which a character meets their tragic or comedic end, materialized as fortune-cookie like shreds of text busting out against a dark background like a firework. This work is part of a larger print and sculpture series exploring the public domain as a cultural archive in which everything that ever happened is always happening.
The title of this work is from a monologue in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which Hamlet is instructing his actors (in the play-within-the-play) to evoke a high degree of naturalism through their performances. To me, this monologue encapsulates the goal of theatre. The playwright and the actors aim to create a microcosm of truth within the play. However, it is the mechanics of theatre itself that I am most interested in, and the truth contained therein (the repetition of the same play though multiple casts, performances, decades… the characters emerge out of nothing to live out their narrative and then disappear again into infinity).
The process of creating this piece is entirely paper-based. I developed a paper lithography technique that allowed me to print all the white strips of text, as well as the black strips of ink that make up the background as a single monotype layer. The substrate is a handmade paper that I created from recycled newspapers. Up close, you can see remnants of the original format – rectangular blocks, snippets of text and advertisements… While historically, print media and paper have been used as vehicles for information and misinformation, my work seeks to allow paper (and the narrative forms it animates) to become a vehicle for a kind of material truth.
This piece is part of a larger body of work which I refer to in my thesis as post-apocalyptic printmaking, an exploration of how print media (now a defunct mode of cultural production) can be freed from its former association with information, allowing for greater revelatory potentials. This research is my response to the ongoing apocalypse of information happening in our current era of AI-generated content and propaganda. We are once again thrust into a cultural apocalypse; this time of digital media. I see the post-apocalyptic landscape of print media as a beacon of hope and material truth.
