Amanda Wood
There were two poems that I connected with in this collection. The conversation between Sappho and Medusa in stanza 8 of Sappho Questions Medusa – jilted, fragmented, coming out of the earth, pausing, breathing, watchful and cautious and the temporal noise, static, and fragmented quality of Static Transmission. Both of these works were on my mind as I made this collection. They were a first foray into these printing methods, an exploration, an acceptance of static and a pause to see and work differently. They seem to have a geologic quality, a sense of granularity, fragmentation and static while exploring spaces between, the pause, the negative space, a place of possibility.
COLLECTION: inspired by Static Transmission
only times particular order | the next rediscovering | to feel what a moon feels | we make meaning from visual static
A series of photopolymer prints printed in the chine collé fashion where the print is made on a thin tissue paper which is simultaneously adhered to a thicker paper on the printing press. These were made with kozo tissue paper from Japan and khadi cotton rag paper from India. Each piece is 8”x8” with one deckled edge.
For me, in-between spaces create a sense of slowness, a place to notice things and a structure for moving forward. Traces of past and present slip and overlap through memories. In the in-between, time slippages, glitches, errors, and vulnerability also become part of the equation for possible futures.
The mnemonic feel of woven or discarded cloths are touchstones for this sense of in-between in my practice. Cloth is ubiquitous, strong, vulnerable, and overlooked. The durational and physical aspects of building, untangling, and unravelling threads and cloth are central to my work which also exists in the in-between as I shift between printmaking, alternative photography, and shaft loom weaving, processes which are steeped in history and dependent on physical labour and technique.
OF STOPS and PAUSES: Inspired by Stanza 8 of Sappho Questions Medusa
A series of collagraphs printed on assorted washi papers from Japan and adhered after printing with the chine collé method on Stonehenge cotton rag paper. Approximately 22”x22”.
Taking their titles from the poems themselves, these etchings were made with photopolymer and collagraphy plate etching methods, using a chine collé technique to make a whole from disparate parts. In photopolymer etching, a piece of cloth is used to create an image on a photo sensitive plate by exposing the photo sensitive coating. After exposure, the plate is further manipulated in the dark to add texture, granularity, unknown elements. With collagraphy, the material itself is adhered to the plate to create an image. Chine collé allows multiple images to be put together. The outcomes are a collaboration with the materials, my body, and the quality of the environment.
Once the plate is cured, an imprint or a series of imprints is made using an intaglio printing method which prints the incised areas of the plate, or with collagraphy, the lower areas of the plate, the parts that are taken away, the edges of the form. The outcome is a combination of old and new technologies, repetition, the hand of the maker and the agency of the materials, and the translation of a tactile dimensional medium (cloth) into a flat plane which is only visually tactile.
Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts for a Research and Creation grant which allowed me to work with a mentor at Malaspina Printmakers Society and create this body of work.