The MAMA Project 2017

I'm gearing up for a new iteration of the MAMA Project, including a bunch of new portraits and voice recordings, and probably quite a different installation, since the space is smaller and different from any I've used before.

The MAMA Project 2017 will happen at the Deer Lake Gallery in Burnaby, BC, from May 11th until June 2. Performance just before Mothers' Day on May 13th. More info here: mamaproject.com

And here are a few previews from the audio I'm editing right now!

The reality of motherhood is so huge; so diverse; so life-changing. There is no measuring how much motherhood changes us as people, or how much change we create in the world through our mothering.

 

Nothing Comes Out: Art as Emotional Release

People grieve in so many different ways. My husband just goes quiet. My sister explodes into a firework of love and tears and fury. My other sister calculates and completes tasks. She gets stuff done. My brother hides away behind a straight posture and generous smile. I paint and write.

My Dad died last year, and my mother (who divorced him when I was a baby) suggested I paint flowers. Seriously. I tried. Her thinking was that it would help me recover some joy. But joy is not me. Well not these days, anyway. So I've gone back to painting songs. And the first one that came out was silence.

Traumatic would be a fun word to describe many of my childhood memories. I used to have this dream all the time (all the time meaning recurring every few weeks from early childhood until after I had my own children) where someone I loved was being killed and I was screaming for help -- but nothing came out. I would wake up full of a adrenaline and with a weight in my chest that was hard to relieve. The unheard scream is a kind of static that imprisons the fear in my lungs and drowns me. I'm tired of painting flowers with this scream caught inside me, so I guess my art is changing, now. Enough of trying to stage other people's faces and voices in my work, though I still value that and am sure I'll get back to it. It's time for me to put my own voice on the canvas, now.

Goodbye silent scream. Hello Emily's voice.

The Importance of Printmaking

I am a printmaker. It's one of the things I'm proud to say about myself. Printmaking is not just a craft, but a way of looking at the world. And one of my life's greatest delights is when I can share this craft and lens with others. Today I was fortunate to have the opportunity to share it with a bunch of kids.

How to make a simple dry-point intaglio print:

First scrape down and round off the edges of your plate. Then plan your work with a permanent marker on the plate.

Then use an etching scribe to scratch the design into the plate. We used acrylic plates first.

Then we used zinc for the second round of prints. The scribe cuts a groove into the surface that has a burr on one side (and sometimes on both sides). This groove will hold the ink during printing.

When the plate is run through the press, the wet paper is pressed into all the grooves, and around the plate, giving a noticeable relief to the print. We can take advantage of this by carving the plate to form an interesting 3-D effect when it's printed.

When using only lines for depth of colour, texture, and form, it can take a very long time to get the whole plate finished.

Some scribes are easier to create deeper lines with, but in the end inking is as much or perhaps even more important to the outcome of the print than the lines themselves.

Ahhh... ink. Thick and sticky, it needs to be mixed well on the glass plate using little cardboard paddles. I don't have a photo of the paper, but generally when we start inking a small plate is a good time to start soaking the thick, fibrous intaglio paper. This ensures that the pulp of the paper will be moveable and will push well into all the crannies of the plate.

Then the ink is wiped onto and rubbed into the etching plates.

Using a smooth paper, we then have to wipe all extraneous ink off the plate! Technically, all the lines (grooves) should hold the ink while it wipes relatively cleanly from the smooth upper surface. However, the wiping can be tweaked in many different ways to allow for a lot of rich moody tones and layers of depth.

Finally, the wiped plate is laid on the press bed, hands washed (for the umpteenth time in this process!), the wet paper laid carefully over the plate, and then a sheet of newsprint and three layers of wool felt. And then we slowly and steadily run it through the tightly-wound press.

And this is what it's all for! That moment when we peel back the paper and discover what we've created!! No two prints are entirely alike, and every time we peel back the paper it feels a bit like a gift.

Between 2-hour-long sessions of intaglio practice, we went out for a very wet rainforest picnic, and to see if we could find some nature-made prints. We found our own footprints, first, then the print left by lichen that has fallen off a tree. We found the hole in the ground left by an uprooted tree, and even an owl pellet! We decided it qualified because, like all prints, it's a mark left by something departed - an impression of the past and a clue about past events.

owl pellet

Prints often have a feeling of melancholy, because of the inherent absence or loss involved in their making. We breathed on the studio windows and made prints of our faces in the steam. They were gone by the end of the day. It's good to think about prints; about the impression we leave upon the world and the impact we have. Prints speak also about memory. They remind us that the impression is not always the same as the original. And like memory, every retelling takes on a different character; a different reality. Prints remind us of our importance in the world, of the many different and multifaceted truths, and of the relative changeability of it all.

Emily on Art

During the years of my children's early life I dedicated myself to childhood. I've been running various programs in my community, from Mothers' Place to Nature Club family outings, to the Wild Art program. As an explorative learning facilitator I teach art and wilderness exploration in various settings, both to children and to adults as parenting courses and professional development workshops. Empowering others to reach out, express and explore has been my passion for over twenty years, and it's a wonderful feeling to know that my work is making a difference.

But I've never only been teaching. I've been making art since I was too young to speak - it's the way I communicate, and increasingly the way I live in community. Every art installation I've done in my adult life has somehow been an effort to bring people in and give them space to engage. My Dad died this year, and I did the only thing I could do to work through the grief: I painted. And drew. And wrote a lot of poetry. I may have nearly painted myself out of studio space, actually. Art and writing has always been my healing process. Now it's working its way into more of my daily life, and impossible to deny that I should be writing about art as much as I do about explorative learning and family life. After all, my own art practice is just another facet of my life and exploration.

Rickshaw Unschooling has been the main public face of my writing, and will continue to be active, but I'd like to start writing more about art, as well, and so this blog begins. Emily on Art. I get a lot of questions about why I do what I do, and I wrestle with a lot of concepts and ideas in my art life. This is the place I'll talk about these things. So send me your questions, comments, and big ideas. Let's explore and see what we can discover!