ARTIST NOTE:
For each woodcut, I took a sheet of veneer and exploited its grain to create woodcuts of some simplicity. Typically for a woodcut you gouge into the surface of the wood, removing the parts you don’t want to print, ink the surface left in relief and make a woodcut. I merely cut a circle into the entire piece of veneer, with the blade mark leaving its kerf missing, rotated the circle in the same plane, and then followed the traditional method of hand-inking and hand-printing with a barren.
The woodcut lines that create the circle also detach the circle from the surrounding material. The pattern of the grain is disrupted, the connection broken, the communication ever so slightly connected.
In “Repeat Integrity (Oak)” I inked the woodcut normally for the first print but did not wipe my matrix clean as one would in order to print again. I then re-inked over it with exponentially ever more ink with each printing, thus obscuring the matrix over time. The effacement is a revelation of its own.
In “Touching Integrity (Larch)” I exploit the slight variations between minor rotations and the inevitable variations when one hand-inks such a large matrix. I am thinking of how every touch connects and alters and draws breaks between presences and absences and between what has come before and what is yet to come.
These woodcuts translate contact. They have a striving quality, appearing to touch, desiring touch, and accomplishing this in their own way.
I wanted the format of my work to match the substance in it.
