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Printmaking at MacDowell
Submitted by Kira Appelhans
My relationship with printmaking began in graduate school when I took a theory class that included 5 weeks of printmaking. The class, taught by Anu Mathur , focused on the exploration of landscape strategies through analog processes of casting, photography and printmaking. This unconventional introduction to printmaking was as much a study of the potential in processes as the production of images. Those five weeks created what has become a life long addiction to printmaking and the opportunity to explore design through an alternative medium. This spring it lead me to the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire where I spent six week developing a body of work.
The MacDowell Colony, America’s first artist residency, was founded in 1902 by Edward and Mirriam MacDowell. Edward, a composer, died a few years after the MacDowells hosted their first resident artist but Mirriam, once a concert pianist, continued to keep the colony thriving. The list of past residents includes, Thornton Wilder, Oscar Wilde, Aaron Copland, and on and on.
A stay at MacDowell is like receiving the gift of time. It is also like going to summer camp for adults. It has been, from the outset, an oasis from the distractions of real-life, a place for artists to hole-up and create. Colonists are given their own studio space and residence. To keep the community connected and creative energy high, breakfast and dinner are eaten family style in the light-filled dining room in Colony Hall. Because every residency is of a different length, from 2 weeks to 2 month, the arrival and departure of colonists-- writers, poets, composers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, play-writes, architects, and photographers-- is constant and the meals are where you meet newcomers. This continual change helps maintain a high level of creative intensity; people are giddy with the freedom to create and it is infectious.
My six-week stay at MacDowell spanned the last weeks of spring and first of summer. So in the midst of my day, walks through the greenly erupting forest became habitual. The proposal that gained me acceptance was a combination of printmaking and design in which I was going to make a series of abstract prints that I then reinterpreted into landscape installations. As landscape architects, we design systems that can accept and survive time and nature’s unimaginable eventualities. Printmaking allows me to compress this timeframe and investigate the unexpected ethereal spaces created by experimental etching and printing methods. My goal was to develop a design without starting, or even using, the plan. I wanted to design using evocative spatial conditions rather than dimensions. Through this I imagined landscape design would be freed from traditional design processes. In reality, the opportunity to work by myself in a huge printmaking studio meant that I spent the entire time making prints. In intaglio printmaking, a copper plate is strategically covered or exposed to a subsequent immersion in a ferric acid bath. The acid eats away any spot of exposed metal leaving indentations in the surface of the plate. When inked, these grooves hold the ink that is then pressed onto wet paper using a large press.
In traditional printmaking, the process is highly controlled and the results predictable. In exploring the bounds of this process as a generative tool, I used the materials in of very un-conventional ways. This included printing on leaves, covering a plate with paint thinner and then dripping the hard ground -- a material that protects the plate from acid -- onto it. I also spent time dripping hard ground on the plate without covering the entire thing and then etching it, and also drilled holes through the plate itself. These non-traditional processes allowed me to think about process rather than image and forced me to trust my intuition when stopping the development of a plate or pushing it further. I definitely pushed several too far, but they are eternally modifiable and when I pick them up again they will be good fodder for continued exploration.
From the first day, MacDowell proved to be a magical place. Once out of bed, I had a 10 minute walk down a pine tree lined dirt road to Colony Hall where a full fledged breakfast and the smiling curious faces of 20 other colonists awaited. After breakfast that first day, were several important meetings; first, the flock of chickens flock and second, the MacDowell gnome, Blake, who delivered lunch. After all that excitement, the most exciting moment was arriving at my studio, a squat green and white building hunkered into the side of a hill with more light than I knew what to do with.
On the second day, when I had settled in and started working and I realized that if I worked just 6 hours a day I would have a lot of work at the end of six weeks. Second to that realization was that I had no idea what I would possibly do with another 500 prints. I decided to suspend that worry and just make.
Also in that first week I established a several rules for my stay. The first was ‘Nothing is Precious’. I printed a sign and hung it above my workspace to remind myself that change equaled progress. The second rule was that every day I had to find something- either by picking it up on a walk in the forest, finding it in a newspaper or magazine, and use it in the next days prints. I figured that would be a good way to keep my momentum up and my preciousness level low.
Soon, my days fell into a kind of routine: breakfast, emails, studio work, lunch (which came delivered in a picnic basket), more work, walk in the forest or to town, work again, dinner, socialize in Colony Hall (this meant pool, chatting or presentations), bed. On many evenings other artists in residence presented their work or had an open studio. Listening and seeing the creative output of the other residents was intensely inspiring. And even better, everyone was incredibly supportive of one and other. I mean it wasn’t hard- everyone there created amazing work. The beauty though, was in the cross-pollination of ideas and images. Words and fragments of others images found their way into my prints, and my prints inspired other artists, writers and musicians to experiment with more impulsive ways of working.
Another unimagined benefit on these nightly soirees was gaining an understanding of others work, both their process and intellectual approach. Most mind blowing was talking to a playwright about how she could only write in dialogue and how writing scene descriptions were an utterly painful task. Or, listening to the music composed by another friend there and realizing that he had thought about every single note I was listening to.
These nights of enlightenment mixed with days of bright sun, blue sky, a psychotically green and erupting forest. Before I knew it I was packing my studio, scrubbing the acid stains from the stainless steel sink and signing my name to the tombstone. Surprisingly, I was ready to leave; six weeks of intense creativity leave one ready for a dose of the real world. But only small doses; within weeks of returning to New York, I was searching the internet for more residencies to apply to. These days, compliments of the economy, I have some time on my hands and have begun the second phase of my proposal and am looking into the prints I made for design inspiration.
To see work made by Kira at MacDowell visit: http://www.working-earth.com
To visit Kira's etsy site:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/workingearth
For information on applying to MacDowell visit their website: http://www.macdowellcolony.org/