May printing at Zygote Press

I love Zygote, it's a wonderful community of artists, printers, and colleagues, but because they don't have A/C and I cannot print when it gets hot and humid, I only print there during certain times of year. I would have started in April but Covid said no, so I rented a month in May and worked as much as my body would allow, and then some (I know, not a great move but the access in the right weather is so precious and fleeting). My process is so simple but it can really confound people. Basically, I'm pressure printing bark lace and hammered bark, and then pulling ghosts from the imprint left on the plate. Skipping the step of mixing ink, you have to spread ink onto the slab to get going.

Then you roll it out. I am not actually strong enough to use this roller and the height of the table is just a wee high for me, so my shoulders and upper body are screaming at me daily. I'm trying to get even coverage on the roller, enough ink but not too much, and no bits of dried up ink in the mix.

Then I have to cover the entire plate (a 2x3-ft piece of plexi that I've already beveled by hand with a file, the LEAST FUN part of this whole process but necessary to protect the press blankets) with an even amount of ink. Again, b/c of my physical limitations, it's not terribly even but can pass for it!

On the bed of the etching press, I set up the bark that I want to print, though the grand thing with pressure printing is that the matrix never touches ink (aside from any that comes thru thin hanji). Later, this bark lace will become the skirt of a dress.

Then I place the hanji that will receive ink onto the bark, where I want it.

Then somehow I have to flip the plate that is inked up, upside down, without getting excessive fingerprints onto it, and get it onto the hanji exactly where I want. Since I'm not a classically trained printmaker, I am extremely bad at registration. Or, I am generally bad at registration b/c I always try to eyeball it and that is not how you should work. There are ways to set up registration guides and I completely ignore that step. Why? B/c this is all paper being printed as a pattern that will be sewn anyhow, not to be single 2D prints that hang on the wall.

Clean newsprint goes on top of the whole mess so the blankets are protected.

Then three separate blankets go on top of the pile: a sizing catcher absorbs any sizing that might come out of the wet paper (this is null in this pass since I have no wet paper AND my hanji is not sized. But we're talking traditional printing). The middle blanket is a cushion that is thicker. The top blanket is the pusher, which is rougher so that it will push the entire thing through the rollers so they don't slide around and not move. These are expensive sets of blankets and see a LOT of wear in a community studio. Want to fund a new set so I don't get weird halos in the middle of my plate? I think they are $450, you can donate here.

Once the blankets are down, you crank the wheel to get the whole thing to pass through the top cylinder and end up on the other side of the press.

Then you reverse the whole thing (blankets off, newsprint off, etc.) and you can kind of see the print falling away from the plate. That's not ACTUALLY how I work, but that's what I did for the picture so it makes a little more sense. Usually I flip the plate and the hanji stuck to it, and remove the paper from the top. Then I slide away the bark, that is sitting on newsprint (to protect the bed of the press and also for easy sliding removal), and put the plate face up. Now it has the imprint of the bark on it and I can get another print! Remarkably in this process, BOTH images will be right-reading. No need to think about reversed images as in relief and other traditional processes.

Before I was doing all that, I had started soaking paper in water. Usually you use European style printing papers, which are made of cotton and short fibers, and very absorbent. I use them behind the thin hanji that I cannot soak in water like this, to help pull my prints. But for this ghost, I am going to actually print onto the Euro-paper b/c it is built to suck up so much ink and makes a gorgeous impression. For fun!

Drip off the water, and then turn around to place between two clean towels.

Lightly run a rolling pin over the entire sheet of paper so it's not dripping or unevenly damp. Then walk it back over to the press without getting dirty fingerprints onto the paper (my old intaglio teacher taught us to use expired Metrocards, folded, to transport cleanly, but those are hard to find these days) OR tearing it (or running into something dirty or somebody).

In the ghost phase, the plate is face up on the bed of the press, the damp paper on top, newsprint and blankets on top of that, and crank away. Sometimes you want to increase pressure on the press at this time, but I already have it kind of hard (my plate was starting to shatter and a corner broke off after a month of printing. Bad technique! But it's my plate).

At the very end, I did a little relief printing, directly rolling ink onto bark, and printing those, but I realized that even though the process is so hard on me, I prefer pressure printing (the ghost harvest is the best bonus for all of the rolling up!).

Now that I'm done in the shop, I have to sew these into dresses for a couple solo museum shows next year. Ideally I'd let all of the prints dry more but there's no time! Zygote is a real treasure in Cleveland, please support them thru donations or come to the annual benefit during the summer solstice! I would love to see you there.

San Francisco in March

While it feels eons ago, in March, I landed in San Francisco and remembered how much I love being there and all of the people it holds that are so dear to me. It was unwise to book nonstop work, while staying in an aggressively hilly area that increased my pain significantly but was a great place to be.

I adore Sarah at SFCB and will do any gig that she organizes because she is so supremely competent. I mean, in a way where you truly do not worry and can relax. Nothing sets her off, so any glitches simply become a way to readjust to a new reality. We scheduled two different workshops. This was my paper thread class, which was delightful! What a fantastic group with many varied but intersecting interests and experience. I loved that Jessica brought her spinning wheel, which no student has done since I was in Western Australia in 2017.

On the second day, I couldn't believe that Nancy worked straight through lunch on her wonderful woven piece, using one of Shanna's signature tools!

During the weekdays I had to transition to my teaching at CCA during Hamaguchi Week. What an honor to share time, food, and insights with Dignidade Rebelde and Courtney Sennish! I loved being introduced to this art community and was grateful to Anthea for the invite to create programming around my toolmakers research.

After my evening lecture in the new building next to a garden that grew some of our lunch salad, I was so pleased to work with Julia and her wonderful papermaking class. The class/studio/dept assistants did the hard work of prepping all of the stretcher bars with water seal, and then we made lots of student sugeta sets! Which means that more students get a papermaking tool, and the studio now has more tools to expand into Asian-style papermaking (Meri Brin, the incredible studio manager, made sure to also order lots of dowels and they were all cut in half for future beating).

I was amazed by how much we could do with all hands on deck, from the prep (ordering, sealing, organizing, etc.) to the tool assembly.

And of course I love to see students working together very naturally.

[photo by Brian Delaney] It was very sunny that day and the papermaking shares a studio with screenprinting. It felt so warm then but now that I'm back home I miss the California sun.

[photo by Brian Delaney] I hadn't said we would make paper but this was suddenly prepped, I whipped up PEO in the blender (only because I knew someone else would have to clean it!), and we did some test sheets with abaca that Julia pre-beat for us.

I got a tiny bit of time to look at art and was totally astounded by these clay replicas of Chinese banned books by Xiaoze Xie.

Afterwards, I was able to have a quick studio visit with Servane, which was utterly satisfying. It was like being filled up with so much joy and delight, and it was so gratifying to be in the space of artists who are so deeply dedicated to their work. So much to see, not that I even saw a fraction of it!

Of course everywhere I go I get to see tools, and Servane showed me this tool she got while traveling, a common fiber mixer/disperser that you'd see in Southeast Asia.

I wish I could have stayed longer with Servane and her studio mate Paloma, but Hyeyung came to whisk me away to the East Bay. I finally got to meet her younger daughter and watch her make a GIANT batch of delicious japchae for a gathering that her quartet organized for a mixed group of people, mostly local but not altogether. They wanted to create a space for people to share music, food, and dialogue about how we want to move forward, how we envision resistance, how we can support each other.

Too soon, I was back to work for my second SFCB workshop on bark lace. I loved that a former student is now an employee there, so again, I felt so confident and comfortable leaving Alisa to cook my fiber the day prior. Students rinsed in batches and then were off to play with bark all weekend.

Parvaneh was so quiet but made a bunch of wonderful samples. I was quite impressed by how much bark this class went through. I got to see Lisa after one of the classes and Steph after another. It was so good to catch up with them, not so much as former students, but almost like sisters. We will go on a true blessing of an adventure next year that I am not at liberty to announce yet, but it's tied up with hanji and love and discovery.

The entire impetus for this trip was so that I could meet Insiya, my dedicated web designer, who dealt with me from a distance for over a year (and still deals with my tangles when I run into knots online). We finally were able to spend classroom time together, but more importantly she welcomed me at her beautiful home and into her daily routine for almost two weeks. She was an impeccable host and drove me to Sausalito on a brilliantly perfect day where we could enjoy stunning views that reminded me of Ireland.

I was also happy to reunite with Carl after many years. He took this pic of me with Jami's new book, which I took with me on the rest of my journeys. I flew to my secret vacation and enjoyed it there, and flew back to SFO only to find that I had contracted covid for the first time ever, which meant that I had to leave California early so that I could be sick at home, alone. Thank goodness I was so well fed by all of my amazing and generous hosts on the west coast and beyond, because that was the sickest I've been in all of my adult memory.

Did I participate in medical tourism overseas to get some relief from my excruciating pain? Yes. I had such a clarifying trip and now I am back in the most overwhelming swirl of life. But next month I'll offer a Grief & Joomchi workshop with my dear friend Tam. And have booked a whole slew of other things that I'll share in a bit.

February: Oak Spring to the rescue

My photos are all out of order and I'm too frazzled to fix so here goes: I'm briefly home after a wonderfully nourishing stay at Oak Spring, easily my favorite residency, and I don't do favorites. This was a day where the clouds were moving fast, here I'm facing one direction,

and here, I turn around to see what's directly behind. This is how I felt in the week and a half that I was delayed involuntarily when I met the worst dealer ever, which held my car hostage, called it a lawn ornament, and in the end called in a locksmith to do what I could have done immediately if I had known the dealer could not do the job. Then once I was finally able to hit the road with less than 24 hours notice, I got caught in a WV speed trap, so I arrived extremely frazzled.

Fortunately, this place is powerfully healing and calming and creates a bubble (here, literally, in a greenhouse). After getting a tip about playing Tetris immediately after traumatic situations like when a cop is screaming at you and you are screaming back, I was amazed to feel the distress dissolve as I settled into what always feels like home, in the best ways.

However, I do need to stop eating here like I'm being fattened for slaughter. It's SO HARD to resist all of the amazing treats that Jason makes for everyone. This was a particularly incredible dessert that disappeared quickly and was part of a giant batch of meals he made for us to take away because we got snow and that shut the place down for a couple of days.

Something I learned early on in this return trip (#4!) is that there is a church thrift store in town and we all went together on my first Sunday to shop. I was delighted to find fun pants.

Much more important was my housemate and studio neighbor, Frauke Materlik. She was perfect from the start, exhorting me to relax and calm down in the house. This is the first time I've ever had to share the house and studio buildings (because of pandemic, and last year, visa issues for my original assigned person), and I was apprehensive. But this was the most ideal pairing. In the depths of my car despair, I worried that it was unwise to go, but my body knew I had to make the trip to be taken care of. I had no idea it was Frauke who would be doing the care! She's an incredible person, artist, gardener, landscape architect, performer and sculptor, German who has lived in multiple countries and now hosts artists in her own country space near the west coast, daughter, sister, and aunt. Sharing space with someone nearly identical in age also was so helpful. I could go on and on but I am so grateful to have met Frauke and hope to see her again soon!

We had a tree in common, a black walnut behind the house. At its base, she harvested fallen hulls that I thought would not work for dye. But they DID, and marvelously so. She gave me some and I dunked the bark weaving and a strip of milkweed paper (they are drying on a sheet that is already messy with kakishibu, which is a different brown). I was overjoyed one night to come home and smell the walnut pot, to be living with someone who was willing to do these tests and then use the dye every day.

I brought kakishibu powder to mix and coat paper and also imparted color every day. This is a two in one: bark lace being dyed on top of hanji.

Another daily task was to knit a page for a book prototype that I've been dreaming of and was working on in my last residency in Michigan in Kalamazoo. 

The daily task that I think provided the most personal growth: drawing the same walnut tree while outside. This is the final drawing in my sketchbook. I began there, and then realized that I could make blank books to fill with enough pages to include over a week of drawings, to show the cycles of life/days/weeks/time and encourage the process of putting one foot in front of the other, even in difficult times. So I went from one daily drawing of this tree to six (my sketchbook plus five books, sometimes a seventh drawing because I'd come back to my sketchbook at the end of the session).

This was my view, minus the septic tank directly to the right. On certain days when it was too hard to sit (like when chairs were freezing and covered in snow or rain), I leaned on what I think is the generator unit box behind the septic tank. We had wild ranges of weather and when it got frighteningly windy (like, the house is going to tear away windy), I thought, I cannot possibly go outside. I tried one day to draw from indoors and it was so distancing and felt too separated that I just bundled up and braved the weather even though it was a short drawing session. I had a lap blanket and everything. Frauke only saw me doing it once, on a bad weather day, and said I was crazy. High compliment!!

Final daily task: processing milkweed. Here is my booty from my stay. I know, seems like so little! But it was so much.

So much because part of the task was to really slow down and spend time with this plant that I've had a relationship with for over 20 years. I wanted to really get down to where which fibers were, and different approaches to separating layers after winter retting. I drew the milkweed daily until I was done (and only processed one stump until about a week in when I got tired of that and did the rest of the batch the last day).

This is why my batch was small, I only harvested a handful! I did that my first day, sad that they had mowed so much that I only had bits to work with, but in a way glad. This is my first stay where I had to really consider my body's limitations, and this was the perfect approach. I knew I couldn't make paper this year here, and that I had to really pare down what I transported. I gave myself rules: only one dye/color (kakishibu), and only what could fit into one bin. In the end, even that was too much! I always forget that I really don't need much to make art. In fact, it's easier to be fully present when I have less stuff.

This was my grounding activity from the start. The big plain bark panel at top right was the first, and then I used up my stashes from there. Only the lower left is paper, the rest is all beaten bark bits that were leftover from grids that I took apart. It's amazing how satisfying this is, something I learned in kindergarten, and how much time it takes.

Every arrival, I make the space my own. That meant clearing old bones from the nook outside my side door to the studio, and stacking what rocks were left behind. I saw this a lot in Korea, all over, at Buddhist sites, beaches, mountains, and so on. It wasn't until now that I understood why people do it. Here, I finally let myself let go of the dreaded and poisoned word/idea of "productivity" and followed Frauke's encouragement, which in the end was what my body was telling me all the time: stay in bed longer if you need, rest when you need (I napped every day except the last two, and really felt the difference when I didn't), enjoy long slow meals, and commune with the outdoors. This was, as I always knew it, the perfect remedy to my always frantic and intense Januarys.

More pictures of Oak Spring in Feb here.

And my studio/art process while there.