Serendipity played a large part in the direction Rice’s work has taken over the past year.

First there was her acquisition of a gocco printer forgotten in a small town craft store. Gocco printers are small, self-contained, screen-printing machines sold as toys in Japan. At one time one in every three Japanese households owned a gocco printer, but with the advent of computers/printers they fell out of use. American crafters have just begun to discover this remarkable tool, but the printers are hard to come by. Rice has been using her gocco printer in much of the same ways she has utilized hand-cut stencils…as the starting point for mixed media paintings. She has been making small one-of-a kind works based on some of her most popular stencil paintings with her gocco.

Rice also discovered of a box of handwritten journals written in the 1930’s by a young girl named Emma at a flea market. She bought them to use with her gocco printer but quickly realized she could use her stencil/spray paint method successfully on antique paper as well. Rice has always been attracted to found objects as “canvas”; exploring the sense of history and connectivity between the object and the imagery, she expands on the objects sentimental nature. Rice has become obsessed with antique handwritten documents and has collected and painted on old love letters (both sweet and illicit), library checkout cards with the names and dates checked out going back 70 years, recipe cards yellowed and evidently well used, as well as the pages of handwritten song lyrics of tunes popular in the 1930’s written out by Emma.

Thematically Rice’s work continues to be inspired by the urban community in which she lives, childhood memories (both real and imagined and sometimes exaggerated with time), vintage botanical prints, her dog Ella, bicycles, street art, random found objects, collective endeavors that challenge hierarchy, acts of compassion, downright silliness and things with wings.