haley t.

Though Relief (specifically woodcut) and I are acquaintances at best, from the prints I have seen and the pieces of its history that I have gathered (‘The earliest printed images were relief prints-the best known method being the woodcut’), I tend to associate the woodcut with tools of antiquity. I think of graphic and weathered imagery, an excellent tool for conveying age and use in a soft yet expressive way.
For this semester I am planning on loosely basing my prints on the theme of Magical Realism, a term used to describe writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s use of exaggerated descriptions of realistic events, and the overlooked aesthetics of the everyday. I’m currently taking a class on the latter and have been fascinated by artists who have used this theme in their work, such as Pablo Neruda in his Ode to Things and Jim Dine with his series ‘From Ten Winter Tools’.

I have a crazy,
Crazy love of things
I like pliers,
And scissors.
I love
Cups,
Rings,
` And bowls- -Pablo Neruda (the whole thing is great, but far too long to post)

At the moment I personally consider the literary works that I have recently immersed myself in to be somewhat more pivotal in my image making and thought process than the visual artists I tend to nod towards. The writer and poet Roberto Bolano with his visceral descriptions of life as an Infrarealist in 1970’s latin America, and various lines from Joshua Beckman poems of the everyday life of a man discontent with being a content American, have provided me with the underlying fodder for my initial sketches. Having said that (totally pretentious phrase) a reoccurring image throughout my work will be tools including human organs and other everyday objects. This idea was partially inspired by Kiki Smith’s lino-cut How I know I’m Here. Her use of four blocks that are almost solely comprised of anatomical body parts inspired the first woodcut I ever made (a simple heart), and will definitely be present in my work to come. The idea of muscles and organs as simple tools themselves, and the interchanging of them with man-made tools in the body are ideas for imagery that I’m playing with.
An example of a literary image that I have extracted from texts I have been reading is a line from Natasha Wimmer’s introduction to Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, in which she quotes him and describes his physical state after living the life of an ‘Infrarealist’ (or ‘Visceral Realist’ as he refers to it in the book):

“Over the years he lost most of his teeth, leaving them behind like “Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs” in the countries he visited on his shoestring travels.”


Kiki Smith’s How I Know I’m Here
Another visual artist whose work I’ve looked to for visual and cerebral stimulation, and who uses what I consider a form of magical realism, is William Kentridge. Though he is a printmaker, I am drawn to his animated films. Though Felix in Exile and History of the Main Complaint in particular, are more akin to charcoal drawings than they are to woodcuts, his use of surreal imagery such as everyday objects (telephones for instance) being present within the human body are what I’m most concerned with. I also really relate to his take on politics in art, and how it is not his main objective but the two can never truly be separated.


In the Everyday Aesthetics Yuriko Saito offers an insight into the theme I’m planning on pursuing this semester, and how I feel about art in general better than I ever could:

Art sometimes challenges us, changes our worldview, mobilizes us toward a certain action, nurtures valuable sensibilities like sympathy, generosity, and respect, and, last but not least, helps move a society in a certain direction. An aesthetic experience of it is also a complicated affair, unlike our unreflecting response to the sensuous surface of the objects, typical of our everyday life. It also occupies a special standout place in our life by providing an enlightening, illuminating, sometimes uplifting and sometimes devastating, insight into self, life, and the world, so that our life is never quite the same after that. But such is not the case with our preoccupation with a green lawn or a wrinkle-free shirt. Or so this argument would go.

This quote particularly stands out in light of the recent atrocity concerning the Rose gallery at Brandeis University. I personally had an experience at the Rose in which I participated in a Marina Abramovic installation, which really had a lasting effect on my life as a young artist. I’m sure that any artist or enthusiast would agree with me when I say that art should not be sold to finance failure.