It has been exactly a month (presuming I post this on the 20th) since I concluded the material of the passages project. Of course, the residuals still exist: I am finishing up the test phase of a book of all 365 pieces; I am continuing to explore the experience through writing; I’ve started to plan how and where I might exhibit them.

When thinking about how I might like to show this work, I keep coming back to how to hang all of them together as one cohesive unit, using all four walls (or more, maybe, depending on the space) to integrate into a circular timeline reminiscent of our path around the sun. I’d hope to show the collection in a rather small space to emphasize the gravity of time and boundaries of space. If not a small space, then I will limit the space in which they can be shown somehow, but this I cannot know yet.

Essentially, the passages study was a way to reinvest myself to a daily practice of art-making. The goal was met; the habit is formed. Now I can continue this exploration more freely and objectively.

Now in my transitional stage, I am further experimenting with other media, still using the sky as theme. It is interesting to me to think of the ever-changing sky as a constant, so I’ve been looking at other ways to build the sky as variable.

The first tangential enterprise was to build paper mosaics, of which I have already written, but as a refresher: I am using the studies that did not work (for whatever reason) and repurposing them into collages, hopefully evoking the idea of looking at and into the sky in patterns. This reiterates my obsession with reusing, repurposing, and recycling information into new ideas or products as an act of resistance toward blind consumption.

Monoprints are a type of anomaly, at least as traditional printmaking goes. I’m thinking to treat them like a small-run series, where the grounding items are the same photograph or drawing (a more static constant), and the sky is somehow the variable, therefore extending the passages project by swapping functional roles.

At this point, I have been only practicing the method of transferring images. After several weeks, I have found a consistent transfer process which means I can now start working on the method of painting the sky which I can do either directly on the plate, or after the print is pulled. As each method has restrictions and benefits, I’m not sure how it will all work out, but I’m chasing an idea here, and it’s none of my business at this point to worry about how it works out.

That said, aesthetically, in this series, I am looking to interpret childhood memories of how I experienced the American landscape via the back seat of a car: vulnerable and with neither power nor choice in the matter.

With this method, I am l looking for this mood: maybe a little muddy, distorted, looking upward and forward, but also fully in the earthly realm, trapped or somehow otherwise bound to it. I hope to reference ideas of overcoming adversity by transcendence; a stopping of time; momentary enlightenment; a spirit reverberant. Perhaps an element of abandonment or neglect and a criticism of the bourgeois economy; the façade of the American Dream, as if everyone’s were the same.

Of what does an American dream?

Phase two of printmaking includes what I’m tentatively calling “trashprints,” though I’m toying with “gabbageprints” and a working media title of “hand-pulled post-consumer waste drypoint.” These are traditional drypoint prints made using post-consumer waste, particularly the lids from industrial canned goods.

It started out with using soda cans which were okay, and maybe even still worth trying, but I absolutely fell in love with using the round lids of industrial canned goods because the lines are so damned crisp. Moreover, I’m hooked on this round, embossed, natural frame. To me, this feels like looking through a peephole, or the way kids play submarine with toilet paper cardboard, or some kind of voyeurism. An private reality: removed, disassociated, solitary.

I started out just trying them at home, hand-burnishing on decent printmaking paper. I love the embossing and how the print actually retains the integrity of the material, and how the can implies a type of halo, which I started playing with a little later mimicking some of the decoration of byzantine icons as a test to see how scratching over the rings would look in the end.

I became somewhat obsessed with a clean edge. I tried everything: hammering, cutting, pounding, flattening, filing, sanding. No matter what, I couldn’t get the edge clean and I felt like the ragged edges were distracting (although, I can see some use for ragged edges at some other point). When inking and wiping the plate, I couldn’t get all of the ink off the edges without wiping too much ink off the image. A solution I was willing to try is a “clean edge” can opener:

Not only are these edges clean in the sense they are perfectly round (aside from the initial nick made when removing the lid) there was a fantastic surprise: of a “coin edge,” which I can ink to emphasize or leave it dry to just emboss. The rings emboss even when fully flattened, but I haven’t decided if I want to pre-flatten these or print them in their “natural” shape.

I’m using the same theme for these, but I’m not sure it is the right imagery for the substrate. I had some ideas to maybe hand-paint the skies post-printing, or pre-paint skies on tissue and chine colle the sky on the print. There’s a lot to explore, and it will take some time, but I think they have potential to be absolutely lovely in a lonely and isolated way.

I am sure it is evident that I am excited to see to where these experiments land and what springs from them. So far, each have distinct personalities and moods, and I’m interested to see how they work individually and in tandem.


Discourse

One response to “Headwinds”

  1. Eve M Kerrigan Avatar
    Eve M Kerrigan

    Beautiful work. So inspiring. You’re so cool.

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