Katie Baldwin
Multiple Discovery: An Impossible Sight, a transformation of a circular space into a linear image.. Woodblock and letterpress, 11.5 x 16 inches, 2020. Edition size: 50 (The titles for this series of works are inspired by Rebecca Solnit's book, River of Shadows.)
“As I move through printing and layering the matrices, I make decisions with each layer.”
Katie Baldwin is an artist in Huntsville, Alabama (USA) and she is currently living and working in Taiwan as a Fulbright Scholar. Katie’s approach to color is deliberate and her approach to printmaking is rigorous. Her narrative and abstract landscape work is created with woodblock and letterpress printmaking techniques and her daily practice includes a larger range of activities such as drawing and quilting. Through this daily practice, she investigates the process of learning through making.
Katie is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the International Printmaking Center at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, expanding her research on woodblock printing techniques in East Asia. She is researching the distinct contemporary and historic methods of water-based woodblock printing in Taiwan and making a series of woodblock prints titled: Modified Land. The content of this work is influenced by her investigations of old and new agricultural and irrigation systems in Taiwan, and considers the way mechanization shapes land.
Are there specific associations towards color in your work?
I make imagery with the analog technology of woodblock printing, while researching ideas around changing technologies. Through reading and site visits, I research changing technologies. I am often influenced by the people and places around me. As I search old and new agricultural and irrigation systems, my work in Taiwan considers the way mechanization shapes land. I like to draw and photograph onsite, responding to the landscape. I keep an active sketchbook practice, develop images from drawing, a method where I can work quickly and intuitively. After exploring imagery through drawing, I refine imagery and translate it to the process of woodblock printing.
Multiple Discovery: Stillness imposed on its subjects, the world represented as a place of objects., Woodblock and letterpress, 11.5 x 16 inches, 2020, Edition size: 50
“During the printing process, careful not to over ink, I build up thin layers of ink on top of each other from multiple passes. This is how I achieve saturated color and deep gradations in the final prints. Recognizable subjects of rivers, mountains and gardens are deconstructed utilizing color, pattern, shape and form.”
Multiple Discovery: They are told to keep time that is no longer solar. Woodblock and letterpress, 11.5 x 16 inches, 2020. Edition size: 50
My woodblock printed imagery is rooted in narrative landscape. For example, in my artist book titled 1825-1862-1918 [shift], I investigated the three diggings of the Erie Canal. In the same way that the canal was dug and re-dug, a story is told and re-told. Each time the canal’s expansion was accomplished with improved technology, a repeated narrative is rewritten from a new perspective.
In Taiwan, I am exploring the traces, modifications, distortions, destructions, transformations, and reconstructions of the Taiwanese landscape. Subjects such as canals, farms, greenhouses, rivers, mountains, cities, and gardens are abstracted. Narratives of people occupying the space within the landscape remain representational. The co-mingling of these two visual approaches create a sense of place where memory, time, and space are expansive, yet fleeting. Working in series, the images will complete each other, depicting a familiar, yet imagined world. Together, the woodblock prints will tell a poetic story about the human capacity to shape the world around us.
Where do you reside between technical and intuitive in your work as an artist using color?
I move back and forth between technical and intuitive approaches as I work with color. I start with a Pantone Formula Guide to plan and mix ink. However, I leave room to make changes or adjust my choices as I work. I start with the Pantone Formula Guide because I prefer to mix a color that I am looking at, rather than a color that is in my head. This concrete and deliberate approach to working with a color I see forces me to commit to a starting place.
Then I begin proofing. When I am printing, I spend a significant part of my time proofing, requiring me to prepare extra paper beyond the edition. I test colors through printing, without the intention of being included in the final edition. This allows me to test and experiment before committing to a particular layer of color.
As I move through printing and layering the matrices, I make decisions with each layer. As I proof each successive layer, I respond and make decisions depending on how it looks in relation to the previous layer. Sometimes I will make decisions to work reductively with particular blocks or carve an additional block, depending on how the image evolves and what needs to be resolved. In this way the printing process embodies a process similar to my intuitive methods of drawing with ink on paper.
Multiple Discovery: The slow motion of parades passing and things rising., Woodblock and letterpress, 11.5 x 16 inches, 2020. Edition size: 50
Multiple Discovery: An action condensed into a horizon. Woodblock and letterpress, 11.5 x 16 inches, 2020. Edition size: 50
Multiple Discovery: Just as viewers see in several directions at once, so they look at several separate moments., Woodblock and letterpress, 11.5 x 16 inches, 2020. Edition size: 50
How does the printmaking process itself relate to how you work with color?
Working from multiple blocks, I physically layer color. In the process, I slowly build complex colors, opacity and gradations. Using a traditional Japanese carving sequence, I carve away what I do not want to print, leaving line and shape in relief. This technique of carving challenges me to think in layers, as well as positive and negative shapes.
This graphic and deliberate approach to carving images is a contrast with the organic texture of wood grain. I further contrast flat graphic space in my imagery by sanding and shallow carving the surface of blocks. Working with multiple blocks, I overlap areas of color, achieving secondary and tertiary colors.
Multiple blocks and physical registrations systems, such as kento registration, allow multiple passes of the same block in the same location. During the printing process, careful not to over ink, I build up thin layers of ink on top of each other from these multiple passes. This is how I achieve saturated color and deep gradations in the final prints. Recognizable subjects of rivers, mountains and gardens are deconstructed utilizing color, pattern, shape and form.