Tandem: Going Places Together

Please join us for the Opening of our exhibition "Tandem: Going Places Together" on September 11, 2015 at 7:30pm at the Mennonite Heritage Center Gallery in Winnipeg. If you can't make it to the opening, the show will be up till October 27th.

Terry will show functional ceramics on wooden structures which invite the user to consider the conscious action of drinking and using a vessel. I will exhibit a selection of thematically diverse suites of prints from the past two years that reflect on life and the engagement with our surroundings.

Canadian Mennonite Cover and Preview

The Canadian Mennonite magazine printed a nice preview of my upcoming two-person exhibition (with my husband Terry Hildebrand) "Tandem: Going Places Together" at the Mennonite Heritage Center Gallery in Winnipeg. What a pleasant surprise to find myself on the cover! Click here to view the Canadian Mennonite. The preview article by Aaron Epp is on pages 28 & 29.

Assiniboine River Trail II

Assiniboine River Trail II.
Linocut. 
75cm x 105cm. 2015. 

Aside from experimenting and challenging myself with multiple etching plates this summer to expand my visual vocabulary and to loosen up my sense of composition (see post below), I wanted to do something more relaxing and I decided to return to my comfort zone of mapping Winnipeg. I returned to one of my favourite images of the Assiniboine River Trail. I had a good time translating parts of an earlier etching from 2009 into a somewhat larger block print (plate size 60cm x 90cm). Instead of using tonal gradations like I did in the etching, I worked a lot with patterning. I'm using a flooring linoleum (in a silly orange colour) by Tarkett. I was fortunate to find a large end roll at a thrift store a few years back, but I believe this material is still available at various flooring stores in different colours also. I did a lot of the carving at home on our little kitchen table evenings and weekends, since, as I said, it was kind of a side project.

When I ink the plate, I use a soft brayer with very little ink to lay down a thin coat of ink on the carved down part of the plate in the upper half of the print. That ink gets picked up only lightly during printing, giving me a soft grey in the background. This effect livens up the space quite nicely. To ink the surface of the plate I use a harder brayer. Well, it's time to print now.

Etching Studies

Here is a selection of the more successful experiments I've been working on during this summer. I have etched about ten different plates (not all of them turned out very well) with image elements about my thesis topic: Changing Landscapes - Explorations of Growth, Expansion and Destruction. In these pieces I work with ideas about the disappearance of the dry forest in the Chaco region in Paraguay, expansion of pastures, the displacement of indigenous people, fences as barriers and separations, etc. These are some of my attempts to layer the different image elements, but I find it's quite the challenge. Nonetheless I'm also enjoying the freedom to try out new things and letting myself be surprised by some of the results. These pieces aren't finished yet and I see them as sketches in their current form that will hopefully lead to larger pieces in the future.

Polishing Plates

Polished and degreased plates.

I've been back at the studio and the best way to get into a routine again is by starting to prepare the plates, bevelling the edges, polishing the surface, degreasing the plates and putting on an acid resistant backing. My plan is to work on a series of square plates (7-10) and then combine them randomly in various formations; some will have more controlled drawing, others will have more washes and painterly shapes. I'm supposed to loosened up more, plan less (!!!), open up my spaces (which I've been trying already last term). None of these things come easy to me, so it's a bit of a challenge, but I think that might be a useful exercise in working with the unforeseen. 

















Polishing plate with electric sander. 

I bought an electric sander to polish all those plates. It works quite well and saves me a lot of time. I start with 1500 grit sandpaper (dry), then use 0000 steel wool by hand with 3 in 1 oil, then the sander again with a piece of old felt (printing blanket) + jeweller's rouge and oil. I think Putz Pomade works also quite well for the final step. This polishing process gets rid of most of the scratches and doesn't leave a sanding pattern. I don't quite get a mirror finish, but a nice even polish with a little buff (see top image). 

Scratched plate before polishing. 

Workshop and Research in Paraguay 2015

I just returned from a five week trip to Paraguay. I taught a one week woodcut workshop to a group of indigenous artists while I was there. I posted more detailed reports and images on my second blog if you want to check it out: http://www.miriamrudolphparaguay2013.blogspot.ca/
I also spent some time researching and gathering information about the changing landscapes of the Chaco region in terms of growth, expansion and destruction/deforestation. Hopefully some of this information will inform my work in the future, but I'm still not entirely sure where my work is going from here, so we'll just have to wait and see what comes of it.

Aerial view. Fields and ranch land, Menno colony. May 2015. 

Transposition

Transposition IV.
Double-Plate Colour Etching, Digital Print, Chine-Collé.
60cm x 90cm. 2015.

As a final piece this past semester I wanted to work on a larger plate. My advisor has encouraged me repeatedly to open up the spaces in my images more rather than making my images quite so dense. Working on a larger scale again (24" x 36") allowed me to do just that, although it was quite difficult for me to know where to stop adding things. I also wanted to see if it works for my imagery to be combined with some digitally printed satellite images, which I collage into the piece. I printed the plate(s) in various stages, using some of the visual vocabulary I had tried out on the smaller plate before (see below).
In Transposition I, I etched a whole section of forest into the plate with the intention of scraping it away again. Before scraping it, I used the cow cut-outs again to remove part of the forest imagery (Transposition II and III) and in the final piece (see Transposition IV above) I added a second red plate to illustrate the expansion of ranch land and the beef production, with the intact forest being fenced in, protected in a a few limited nature reserves.

Transposition I.
Etching, Digital Print, Chine-Collé.
60cm x 90cm. 2015.

Transposition II.
Etching, Digital Print, Chine-Collé.
60cm x 90cm. 2015.

Transposition III.
Etching, Digital Print, Chine-Collé.
60cm x 90cm. 2015.