episode 258 | Heather Muise

This week Miranda speaks with Heather Muise—a Canadian printmaker living and working in Greenville, North Carolina, where she’s a teaching professor at East Carolina University. Heather has taught printmaking across continents, including seven years in Dubai, and their conversation moves through all of those layers: place, language, culture, and how those experiences shape what we make.

They talk about Heather’s evolution from being a diehard lithographer—fast, loose, printing full editions in a single day—to falling deeply in love with the slower, more patient demands of etching. We get into her approach to color etching using a CMYK process on a single plate, and how that method connects back to her lithography brain in a way that just clicks.

But the heart of this episode is symbols—how they travel, how they hide meaning in plain sight, and how they can guide a viewer without spelling everything out. Heather shares how growing up bilingual, living abroad, and even experiencing functional illiteracy in a new writing system pushed her deeper into thinking about coded visual language—everything from carpets and borders-within-borders, to tattoo iconography, to dream logic.