In Printing Elephant Mountain

 This exhibit began with a series of poems and a desire to experiment with incorporating and responding to text in a purely visual way, moving it away from its traditional home on the page and into a gallery setting.

 The essence of printmaking is to create impressions on paper from images that have originally been drawn, painted, carved or engraved onto a plate, block or stone. The potential of this process lies in the printmaker’s ability to create multiple versions of an image. In this series of work, I have broken with printmaking tradition in that no image has been “editioned” (printed multiple times). I have incorporated the prints and plates with equal status. The presentation is both varied and unconventional.

Process is an all-important aspect for a printmaker. Often, images go through a number of great transformations, with reversals, layering and the variation of surfaces and textures. By including the plates, I hope that the viewer will gain insight into the printmaking process and the unique effects that can be created. You are invited to interact with the large MDF jigsaw plates that I used to print the Mountain Tapestry. Create your own compositions and imagine the original prints that could result.

 --Natasha Smith

   November, 2006

Natasha Smith & Eileen Delehanty Pearkes

November, 2006

E: When I saw Natasha Smith’s cera colla compositions of ancient Scottish ruins in a show at the Mildred Erb Gallery a few years ago, I was drawn to them instantly. They demonstrated her intuitive feel for landscape and history -- twin interests that I share.  I approached her with four poems I had written about Elephant Mountain and we began to explore the possibility of putting text on the walls.

N:  As a printmaker, it was important to me that I respond to the poems in a non-literal way, not simply illustrate them.  To investigate fully the possibilities of how the text could be incorporated into my own response, I explored a wide range of media. Each medium connects to a certain poem. Mountain Tapestry was a response to the series of poems as a whole, with fragments of the work being printed individually and then reassembled.

E: Mountain Tapestry creates a collage that aptly releases the words from their rigid and linear place, expressing visually the playful aspects of the poem series.  This collage glimmers with the nuance and richness of any good literary experience, yet it does so on visual terms.

N: How the text appears in or with each of the works I have created varies with each piece. Words have meaning in contrast to other words, whereas images carry meaning in a more fluid way. I believe that a greater imaginative and symbolic power is given to the visual quality of words when they are fragmented into a line or single word.

E: Poems are highly structured and attentively formed literary objects. Poets tend to attach an almost sacred weight to the exact placement of every word, comma or line break. It was liberating for me to watch Natasha release the words from their contextual and symbolic bondage. In her work, they flow freely in a way that actually matches more closely the uncontrolled imaginative process I engaged in as I composed them.

N: In If a Mountain Could Paint, I have created a story-board effect, with the work of multiple elephant painters divided along three long panels composed of individual collagraphs, plates I made by applying collage materials and glue to a solid surface. The fourth panel frames a series of copper printing plates. I engraved Eileen’s own handwriting onto the copper, using a photo transfer technique. I decided not to reverse the handwritten text for eventual printing, but to display the copper intaglio plates themselves. The plates were rubbed with garlic and then freely painted with oils, following a tradition of painting on copper that dates to the early 16^th century.

E: Typically, the printing process typesets and thus removes the writer’s original handwriting from view. With widespread use of computers, handwritten drafts have become nearly archaic, though poets especially still begin this way. This piece delights me in its reference both to local copper mining history and to the writer’s more antiquated and original tool: a pen in hand.  

N: In Elephant Dust, the print mirrors the wood block that made it, quite clearly showing the reversal that takes place, as well as how the essence of the original print block can be maintained through the transfer of the grain pattern. I have chosen to work with muted colours, suggesting the smoke and ash that accompanies fire rather than the hot colours of the flames and summer sun.

E: Wood clothes the Elephant, feeds the fire and makes the ash. This choice of medium demonstrates to me how Natasha uses metaphor. Careful readers will see that the text of the poem embedded in this print differs slightly from the text presented at the start of the show. This difference (and there are others in other pieces) demonstrates the nearly compulsive editing that can occur with poetry. Since I gave Natasha “completed drafts” over a year ago, many minor revisions to my own text have occurred.

N: In Beginnings, multiple layers of cera colla (a wax paint medium from early Egyptian times) were applied, yet the final engraved image is my spontaneously created reaction to memories and thoughts of birth. The words are encased in wax as though they are floating in fluid, with many of them inferred and not quite discernable.

E: Originally, the title I gave the poem Natasha is responding to “Dreams of Chartreuse Silk.” In other cases, she adopted my poem title for her piece, but not this one. When I saw Natasha’s ecstatic visual interpretation of the poem, I changed my title to match hers. She has drawn forward images and colours that were embedded in the meaning of the poem but not obvious to me. Red as well as green is a colour of new life. Fluid, whether it be amniotic or snow-melted, makes all life possible.  

N: In A Winter Affair the Plexiglas, cool and icy, hangs like a window so that the mountain can be seen from both sides. Transient viewers can be seen through the work.  In the daytime, light from the south-facing window passes through the piece, casting a shadow on the floor of the gallery. In evoking the mountain, I wanted to use fluid, gestural marks that have a figurative suggestion.

E: I look out at Elephant Mountain from my writing studio window. For many years, especially in winter, I have harboured a curiosity about what the mountain might look like if I could see it from the other side. I was so astonished when Natasha told me she was working with Plexiglas for this piece.  A Winter Affair has allowed me to step through to the other side of the mountain so that I can have a good look.  I like what I see.