Noelle Herceg is the second of four artists to be featured in the CFAR Project Incubator series spanning the 2023-24 academic year. The series is a partnership between the Knight Campus and the College of Design / Center for Art Research (CFAR). Herceg's series starts on Nov. 6 and will conclude on Dec. 4.

CFAR affords artists working in any medium the opportunity to explore and conceptualize new work as a part of a vibrant, interdisciplinary research community that is supported by cutting-edge facilities and technical staff. This program is born out of CFAR and Knight Campus’s goals to create nimble systems that catalyze innovation and discovery by responding to the needs of individual’s specific research agendas. The incubator's emphasis is not necessarily on the production of a body of work, but instead on speculative, practice-based inquiry focused on ideation, experimentation, prototyping, testing, fabricating, and theoretical research to initiate and incubate new work.

"I explore physical, spatial, and temporal materialities through a lens of printmaking, creating bio-plastic forms that undergo multiple stages of transmutation," said Herceg. "My work is motivated by the 'print' as a trace, leftover, or way of documentation that may or may not last. My ongoing series of work investigates a connection between the materiality of gelatin–collagen based protein obtained from decaying animal skin, bones, and tendons - and my own skin."

The concept of Herceg's project is, in part, "to utilize the printed image and explore the interaction between printed imagery and the transient surface of gelatin plastic" and to create discussion about the "kinship and ephemerality" of gelatin.

Learn more about CFAR and all of the scheduled artists for this year's incubator series. The CFAR Project Incubator series is made possible by a grant from the Ford Family Foundation.