Relief Printmaking

I thought I'd share the most recent print that I completed at SIUE. This is a reductive woodcut with oil based ink on 50 gsm BFK Rives printing paper.

A reductive woodcut has an interesting creative process. You carve, print, carve away more, print again on top of the previous run, carve away more, print on top of the previous two runs, etc. You are layering up color and basically destroying your wood block as you go because once you carve an area away, you can never print it again.

I ran this woodblock through the press eight separate times - one time for each color you see within the scene. After I completed eight runs, I stamped the three smoke tendrils on top. For the stamping, I utilized the fuzzy backside of a scrap of leather I had laying around. I cut out the shapes from the leather and then printed them on by hand, using a metallic ink and rubbing with my fingers.

Conceptually, I was working with the apocalyptic vision seen by Jack Wilson, a Native American and member of the Sioux tribe. Wilson, known as Wovoka among his people, saw the earth splitting open and the ancestral spirits pouring forth to take back the land that been taken from them by European settlers. News of Wovoka's vision spread fast, spurring what became known as the Ghost Dance movement. Tribes performed the dance in hopes of bringing that day closer. The new settlers were not oblivious to the religious fervor spreading like wildfire, and felt that their safety and the sense of "order" that they had established was threatened. This fear lead to the massacre of 250 Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890. (More information about the Ghost Dance and the Massacre at Wounded Knee can be found here.)

I created this print to honor the tribal traditions of our indigenous peoples and those who died in the Massacre at Wounded Knee. I chose to call this piece "Catalyst". The title references our cultures inability to respect things that we don't understand or behaviors that do not fit into our idea of "normal". The vision that Wovoka had served as a catalyst in what was an inevitable act of oppression by a society that couldn't accept people unlike their own.