About the artist

I grew up near Pittsburgh, where the best bits of my childhood were spent at Buhl Science Center and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I spent a lot of time playing with a Spirograph, collecting every possible color of ballpoint pen, carving rubber-stamp alphabets out of erasers, and staring at the sky.

I moved to Seattle in 2004, and am a 2009 graduate of Cornish College of the Arts. My concentrations were in printmaking and letterpress, combining traditional techniques with digital influences. The result is a sort of anachronism: spam subject lines printed in hand-set metal type, or fractals rendered in woodcut.

My work may be roughly divided into the following categories: (a) those that are little and fiddly, (b) those that are chaotic, (c) experiments, (d) those that require excessive explanation, (e) inside jokes, (f) those with an obvious message, (g) derivative works, (h) systems of growth, (i) interesting mistakes, (j) artifacts, (k) mechanical contrivances, (l) others, (m) those abandoned before completion, (n) those that look nothing like they did when I imagined them.

Some notes on names

In the late '90s I was making lampworked beads, and my favorite kinds were ones with lots of concentric spots: eye beads. Late one evening a group of friends were discussing which things they would be god of, if they suddenly had the option of turning into a minor deity. It was ultimately decided (by the God of Beards and Beer) that I should be Polychroma, Goddess of Colors and Eyes. And so it came to pass.

Mr. Velocipede is one of my long-standing internet handles. You can read about it here.