Terrarium (This World, It Doesn't Belong To Me.)

Mountains, 2013, ink on paper, 13 x 11

I made this drawing when I went to Iceland in 2013. I am interested in the relationship between drawing and print. Of course, when I am drawing, I am working much more spontaneously. I generate images in response to the things I see. I work quickly, generating lots of work, most of which isn't particularly resolved. But out of the work, there are small moments or lovely images or surprising seeds of ideas that lead into ideas for prints.

When I work with wood, I carve and print reductively.

Instructions reductive printing:
1) Carve away everything that is to stay the white of the paper.
2) Print your first/lightest color (let's pretend it is yellow).
3) Carve away everything that is to stay the lightest color (ex: everything that is to stay yellow).
4) Print your second/medium color (let's pretend it is green).
5) Carve away everything that is to stay the medium color (green).
6) Continue in this way, each time progressively working from light to dark and from large shapes to fine detail.
7) In the end you have very little block left. This also means you can never go back and reprint.

Reduction printing, it's a commitment. You can never go back.

I made a print based on the drawing of the mountains in Iceland. 

Terrarium (This World It Doesn't Belong To Me.), 2014, woodblock, 14 x 11

I worked with wood, reductively, printing in an edition of 40. I used three blocks, carving and printing 36 layers to develop the image for this print. When I started, I didn't really know how many impressions I was going to have to make in order for it to "be finished". The process had the push and pull that I feel when I am drawing: I work and develop and regret and re-fix and invent until finally it is finished.

To record the progression, I scanned (most of) the layers, each time I pulled an impression. The result, this silly little movie. On Friday, December 6th, this print is available for sale at The Print Center Annual Auction.

Making Things

Color Study #1, 12" x 12", front view

Color Study #1, 12" x 12", back view

I starting making these things last spring in Alabama, picking out the colors and cutting the squares. I sewed them together in Philadelphia this summer. I pieced them impulsively, intuitively making decisions about color. I quilted them this fall, back in Alabama. It has been an extremely busy fall and one of my simple pleasures was working on these pieces at the end of day. Each night setting a little goal for myself: sew for the length of one Columbo episode. It was something I could accomplish, requiring little thinking and eventually they were all finished.

Very early on in my life of making things I was a young mom, often distracted, without much time or cash. Making quilted things was the way in which I developed a studio practice. Fifteen minutes was about the maximum time I had to focus on anything. So I needed to make things that I could pick up and put down. Something that could be interrupted. Something that could be folded up and put away. Something transportable. And I gravitated to sewing.

These days, with my daughter grown, I have a lot more time in the studio. However, I am often overwhelmed at how fast things are moving. My days feel packed with people and obligations and work and time passes quickly by me. I am tugged daily by the current of a long list of things to do. I feel the pull of stress and distraction.

Piecing and sewing, this is a way of working that I am revisiting in my practice since my move to Alabama. Working in small steps with materials that fold up and are carried with me. Materials that can be spread out on the bed as I work and watch television. The result is secret side projects--things that are not prints.

Color Study #2, 12" x 12", front view

Color Study #2, 12" x 12", back view

Color Study #3, 12" x 12", front view

Color Study #3, 12" x 12", back view

Blue: The far becomes near, and they are not the same thing.

Henry Bosse, From the Bluffs at Fountain City, Wis. looking upstream, 1885; cyanotype.

"There is an album of oval photographs made sometime in the late nineteenth century by a man named Henry Bosse. All the pictures are of the upper Mississippi River, and they are all cyanotype blue. At first, they seem to portray an enchanted realm, the river once upon a time, but Bosse was working with the engineers, who were strangeling and straightening the river, turning it from a meandering wild thing with islands and eddies and marshy edges into something narrower and faster-flowing, a dredged, banked stream for the rapid flow of commerce. They made wing dams, out croppings that trapped sediment and erased the natural edges of the river, dredged it and locked it, but Bosse's pictures are more beautiful than documentation and engineering require, each one a cameo of blue, blue all the way to the foreground of blue railroad yards and blue bridges under construction. But in this world we actually live in, distance ceases to be distance and to be blue when we arrive in it. The far becomes the near, and they are not the same thing."

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, pg. 34-35

I have spent some time thinking about the color blue. I painted my childhood bed room blue. I gave my daughter the middle name blue. And I mix blue ink over and over again.

A How to: Enclosure for Snow Exchange

This fall I participated in a portfolio exchange titled: Snow for the International Mokuhanga Conference in Tokyo Japan. Today, I put together a handout for the exchange participants to be able to make an enclosure for the set of prints that they received. The following images are intended to extend the information on the hand out and provide photographic images of my process making the portfolio.

Self closing wrappers are made from two strips of heavy paper or Library Board (.020). Grain direction runs parallel with the folds.

1. Use a strip of paper to measure and mark the books height (H), width (W), 

and thickness (th).

For the Snow portfolio, I found the height (H) to be 33cm, the width (W) to be 27cm, and the thickness (th) to be 0.7cm. 

2. Measure and cut a horizontal piece of .020 Library Board (or heavy weight paper) to the height (H) of the book by two times its width, plus three times its thickness (th), plus an extra 5cm. 

[H x (2W + 3th +5cm)]

Grain short!
For the Snow portfolio I found this measurement to be 33cm x 61.1cm.

3. Mark, Score, Fold.

I use the portfolio prints to physically check my measurements and make decisions about where to score.

I set dividers to the thickness of 0.7cm.

I use a ruler and the dividers to score the thickness.

 4. Angle-cut (or round) flap.

If you don't have a corner rounder, use scissors!

Place prints inside and check to see if everything fits properly before going on.

6. Cut vertical strip to the width of the portfolio by two-and-a-half times its height, plus two thicknesses. [W x (3H + 2th)]. For the Snow portfolio I found this measurement to be 27cm x 83.9cm.

Triangle can ensure that the lines you score are straight!

7. Mark, score, fold vertical strip using prints in the horizontal wrapper to physically check measurements and make decisions about where to score.

I re-set my dividers to include the thickness of the paper. (0.75cm)

8. Angle (or round) corners.

9. With a gouge and mallet (or hole punch), punch a thumb notch center on one edge of vertical strip.

10. Put a line of double-stick tape opposite from the thumb notch.

11. Attach the horizontal piece to the vertical piece. I carefully line things up and double check that everything fits before I remove the double-stick tape.

12. Place prints in wrapper.

Fold.

And wrap.

Finished!

Read Make Walk Think Write

"Sometime in the near future it may be necessary for the writer to be an artist as well as for the artist to be a writer."

Lippard & Chandler, 1969

It has been a year since I had opened the book Materializing Six Years, Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art. With the close of the school year, it is now officially summer, the season for delicious time in the studio. Long days to read, make, walk, think, and write. Re-reading Lippard brings back into focus all the "good ideas" I had last year. How is it possible that they have gotten pushed--squished--into the back corners of my mind? Meanwhile my mind has been filled with the details of survival: How much transparent base will I need to last the semester? What other ways are there to demonstrate the long & link stitch more clearly? Can Art Club fulfill it's destiny of being cooler than it sounds? 

Today I feel like I did when I was a kid with the summer stretching out in front of me, full of possibility. But the fact is that I am an adult and summer will be over before I know it. I can not linger too long with thoughts of the past--I intend to move forward...but before I do, I wish to take a moment to look back at the artists I was thinking about last year: Ellen Gallagher, Kiki Smith, Margaret Kilgallen, Blexbolex, Hedi Kyle, Ann Hamilton, and Shoichi Kitamura.

Ellen Gallagher

In the commercial world new technologies often render old technologies obsolete—however, art enjoys a kind of freedom from this. Historically we see that the invention of lithography has not made woodblock printing an obsolete artistic expression. As technologies develop, printmaking has the luxury to bring together multiple processes. In DeLuxe, Gallagher works alongside a master printer to create this 60 component print. They combine everything from etching to laser cut paper to Plasticine. This a clear example of how digital and analogue processes together extend the possibilities of print.

      DeLuxe, by Ellen Gallager, 2004-5, printed and published by Craig Zammiello of Two Palms Press                  Installation view 6 x 12 ft.

Detail of DeLuxe, component size: 13 x 10 inches

Kiki Smith
My Blue Lake was created in 1995—about 5 years before the digital technology that could create this image would became common place. In order to achieve the effect of taking a three dimensional object and visually laying it out flat, Smith turned to old technology--a periphery camera— a 1940’s technology used for photographing cylindrical objects.

My Blue Lake by Kiki Smith, 1995, 43 x 55 inches, Printed and published by Universal Art Limited Editions, Medium: etching with photo gravure, a la poupee inking and lithography

Margaret Kilgallen
I appreciate Kilgallen’s use of letterform as image and the way in which she embraced the character of line quality created by her hand.

Friend and Foe by Margaret Kilgallen, 1999, Installation view Dietch Projects, NYC

Blexbolex
These are four views from the commercially published book Seasons. While Blexbolex illustrates using the computer, it’s clear to me that he has an understanding of screenprinting. Despite the fact that he doesn’t use this analogue technique to create his images, he does use the language of printmaking. Paper is considered a primary element in the image. A limited pallet of transparent colors overlap to create a complex use of color. He applies the limitations of analog printmaking to his imagery, rather than simply using the seemingly endless digital processes.

Seasons by Blexbolex (four views), 2010, Published by Enchanted Lions Books

Hedi Kyle
I noticed a folded paper structure sitting on the shelf the first day I arrived at the Wells Book Arts Center in the fall of 2011—and I really fell in love with it. I discovered that the artist was Hedi Kyle, one of my teachers in graduate school. She is very accomplished in the craft of books and conservation, yet her work is not confined by the traditions of craft. Years after having her as my teacher, I see how brave her work is and that she models an art practice where understanding is gained through making.

Untitled, by Hedi Kyle, 2009, 3 x 3 x 3 inches, Medium: clementine wrappers

Ann Hamilton

In December 2012 I went to Ann Hamilton’s installation at the Armory. It is a complicated, multiple media installation, quite difficult to describe succinctly. I am going to pare it down for you by saying—imagine this: people, swings, pulleys, a large curtain of moving fabric, birds, performers, singing, reading, writing, wireless-speakers, recording for vinyl, radio transmissions, and the internet. 

Installation view, photo by Tae Won Yu

Mirah and I on one of the swings, photo by Tae Won Yu

But what I wish to focus on is this: after spending over 3 hours at the installation, I left with a newspaper that had been printed specifically for The Event of a Thread. And this got me thinking about a quote that I really like by Johanna Drucker.

  

“Whenever we make a work, now, I think we are aware that it is not just a book, painting, drawing, sculpture, but an argument about what a book, painting, drawing, sculpture or other aesthetic expression can be and might be in our times.”

Johanna Drucker

The State of the Book:

A Conversation By Johanna Drucker and Buzz Spector

The California Printmaker, 2011

Newspaper ephemera from The Event of a Thread, by Ann Hamilton, 2012

Detail of Newspaper ephemera from The Event of a Thread

Hamilton uses the newspaper as a kind of colophon for the installation. It is a structure that holds the artists’ statement, her source material, her research and acknowledgements.

However, Hamilton is not using the form of a newspaper simply as a way to convey content, but because it’s form has content–As Johanna Drucker might say: Hamilton makes an argument about what a newspaper can be and might be in our times.

Shoichi Kitamura

In the summer of 2011, I visited my carving teacher, Kitamura-san at his studio in Japan. He showed me a ton of work he had done as a professional carver in Japan. These are three of four prints from a Wilson Sheih portfolio. Kitamura had carved the blocks for this project. I really like Wilson Sheih’s work, so of course these were a pleasure to see, but honestly—as a person working with these processes—if find these to be technically amazing.

Artist: Wilson Sheih, Carver: Shoichi Kitamura, Printer: STPI, Title: Music Families (view of three of the four prints from the portfolio), 2009, 26.5 x 19 inches

Detail of Music Families, Artist: Wilson Sheih, Carver: Soichi Kitamura, Printer: STPI

Another project that Kitamura showed me during that visit, was two prints that he had carved and printed for the artist Andrew Brook of Melbourne, Australia. While Kitamura is a master carver by trade, he is also an accomplished printer. Brook typically works with photographic images and collage elements, that are then printed as lithographs. But in this project Brook took a photograph with a collaged newspaper headline, and enlarged it on the Xerox copier. He gave this to Kitamura and had him “translate” the image to the process of mokuhanga.

Detail View of Xerox copy Collage by Brook Andrew, 2009, 38 x 26

Detail view of mokuhanga print, Title: Even a Failing Mind Feels the Tug of History, 2009, Artist: Brook Andrew, Carver and Printer: Shitochi Kitamura, 38 x 26

Detail of Xerox copy college by Brook Andrew, 2009, 38 x 26

Detail view of mokuhanga print, Title: Legions of War Widows Face Dire Need in Iraq, 2009, Artist: Brook Andrew, Carver and Printer: Shitochi Kitamura, 38 x 26 caption

These are huge prints. Kitamura demonstrated to me how he uses his feet to place the paper in the registration system. These are truly amazing technical achievements, but also very strange as an idea and as an image. The mokuhanga printed image is beyond real. And this idea that an artist appropriates a photo and a newspaper clipped headline, makes a duplicate with a Xerox machine, then hires a master carver and printer from Japan to then make another duplicate is fascinating. And made even stranger, when you consider there are very very few people who could technically accomplish this.