Monday, June 29, 2015

Printmaking Quilt



I’d like to commence this blog with a project from last December. It was my Printmaking 2 final project, and entailed both wood block and pronto plate prints.

I began with the concept of making a quilt of small square prints, and after some concept sketches as seen below, I developed the imagery and the story behind them.


Trying to find a narrative flow.


Rough color scheme

The images were split into 2 categories, both by their content and execution. The woodblock images I drew directly onto 6”x6” plywood blocks, and carved away the excess. The other images were to be produced as pronto plates, which is a form of paper lithography. I drew all of these on regular paper, and then transferred them onto the pronto plates using India ink, litho crayons, and a light table.    

        
Light tables saved my sanity.

After that it was a matter of printing the blocks and plates! All 20 were printed on rice paper, which I felt would give a more cloth-like quality to the final product. Unfortunately I don’t have any shots of the actual printing process, but pronto plates are definitely less intuitive (for me at least) than relief printing. They involve first sponging water, and then rolling ink, onto the plates. The ink is repelled by the water and attracted to the India ink and the litho crayon. 
All the final pronto plate prints
All the final wood block prints

And now to explain what this whole thing is about (which perhaps I should have talked about earlier, as incentive to read the darn blog). 

This patchwork quilt alternates narrative and symbolic prints. It results from my relationship and thoughts regarding childhood and fairy tales. The pronto plates are focused on my relationship with memory, childhood, and idealizations of both, as informed by reading, constructions of childhood, the romantic child etc… In this short narrative I attempted to depict the odd balance I walk between the awareness of how steeped in assumptions and influenced by societal constructions my notions of childhood are, and the attachment I maintain to these idealizations. It struggles with trying to capture and preserve an aspect of myself I can never understand or truly be sure was ever really there.

The wood blocks are a reflection on my evolving relationship to fairytales. Like my relationship to ideas of childhood, I recognize that my understanding of fairytales are influenced by cultural associations across history. However, what I love about fairytales is that everybody seems to have a different relationship with them, a different favorite. Gripe about Disneyfied stories all you want (much of it is very justified)— I love ALL the different options and how you can piece together what you want to take away from the vast compendium of stories. These images depict key elements to my personal relationship to them, from films/picture books, to novelizations, and some of the first literary versions themselves.
My tumblr post breaks down each image individually for those further interested in the project, as well as showing larger scans of each individual print.

To finish it off, I spent 4 hours sewing (if you can call my fumbling that) the whole quilt together.







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