Ken Wood
I was working on this series of prints in 2011, and I didn't have a title, and didn't know yet what, if anything, the prints would mean to other people. There were only about 15 or 20 images so far, and I was showing them to only a few people. In the studio I was working with two professional printers from Pele Prints, so of course we had a dialogue about the work - mostly about technical and formal aspects of the work, like registration, color, and transparency. My view of the work was that it was a discourse between the grid layers, which were expressed in bright colors and hard geometries, and the gestural layers, which were dark and fluid.
When I started to emerge from the studio, I realized I needed to start thinking about how I wanted to present this work to the public, starting with a title (I had a show coming up at Good Citizen in St Louis). Although I was thinking of it in terms of grids and gestures, I didn't think "grids and gestures" was a very good title. To brainstorm about what the title might be, I showed the work to my then-7-year-old stepdaughter and her 6-year-old cousin, and I asked them to tell me what they saw in it. I wrote down their list - buildings, a river, windows, steps, ladders, and letters - and I began to see how architectonic the images were, and how they interacted with each other as a kind of language. I thought about how the combining of the different parts of this language happened through layering (one image printed on top of another), and also about stratified layers of the city - from the ground and rivers, to the streets, to the buildings built on top. "Strata" became the working title for the suite of prints, and it stuck.
- K.W. 08/17
When I started to emerge from the studio, I realized I needed to start thinking about how I wanted to present this work to the public, starting with a title (I had a show coming up at Good Citizen in St Louis). Although I was thinking of it in terms of grids and gestures, I didn't think "grids and gestures" was a very good title. To brainstorm about what the title might be, I showed the work to my then-7-year-old stepdaughter and her 6-year-old cousin, and I asked them to tell me what they saw in it. I wrote down their list - buildings, a river, windows, steps, ladders, and letters - and I began to see how architectonic the images were, and how they interacted with each other as a kind of language. I thought about how the combining of the different parts of this language happened through layering (one image printed on top of another), and also about stratified layers of the city - from the ground and rivers, to the streets, to the buildings built on top. "Strata" became the working title for the suite of prints, and it stuck.
- K.W. 08/17
Embark at Rush Hall at Wilkins.
Ken Wood. Strata, relief monoprints, 2010-14
Ken Wood. Strata, relief monoprints, 2010-14
STRATA - 2010-2014
I gave myself an assignment: put two opposing elements into the same space and try to create a synthesis between them. The elements I chose, grids and gestures, were the themes of two earlier, separate explorations. In putting them together, I first wanted to establish them as independent and opposite, so I gave each a different texture, color, and scale, and printed each using a different technique (collagraph versus relief printing). This was to ensure that there would always be some lingering tension in the composition. To make them complement each other, I bent the rules they each came with. Grids are supposed to be flat, predictable and anti-narrative, but I distorted my grids to give them depth and motion. Gestures are often seen as relating to forms of nature or the body, but these gestures also refer to the harder geometries of industrial design and urban planning. So each opposing element takes a slight step toward the other. Further tweaking allows them to harmonize, to complement each other, to reverse roles with each other.
I gave myself an assignment: put two opposing elements into the same space and try to create a synthesis between them. The elements I chose, grids and gestures, were the themes of two earlier, separate explorations. In putting them together, I first wanted to establish them as independent and opposite, so I gave each a different texture, color, and scale, and printed each using a different technique (collagraph versus relief printing). This was to ensure that there would always be some lingering tension in the composition. To make them complement each other, I bent the rules they each came with. Grids are supposed to be flat, predictable and anti-narrative, but I distorted my grids to give them depth and motion. Gestures are often seen as relating to forms of nature or the body, but these gestures also refer to the harder geometries of industrial design and urban planning. So each opposing element takes a slight step toward the other. Further tweaking allows them to harmonize, to complement each other, to reverse roles with each other.
To bring these opposing elements together, I stacked or layered them on top of each other. Working in layers is the most basic of printmaking techniques, but this layering also refers to the layers of a city, and the stratifications of the earth’s surface. Every print has no more than three layers, each one being either a grid or a gesture; this was a sub-challenge I set for myself - to work with simple, spare elements while still achieving complexity in each final image.
The gestures and grids each have their own meaning. I started working with gestures in an earlier series as a way of exploring the movement of the body in relation to the making of a painting. For this exploration, I built a series of mark-making tools that would engage the body in different ways and at different scales, and I used them to traverse the canvas, leaving tracks in their wake. The idea was that even in a non-figurative image, the viewer could still imagine the path and sequence the body went through as the painting was being built, thus revealing the figure in abstraction.
The grid comes from the idea of drafting. The parallel rule and triangle are the basis of traditional drafting, and they are the support on which many other geometries can also be built: curves, diagonals, perspectival constructions. I wanted to use just grid – vertical and horizontal lines only – to build compositions that contained curves, diagonals, and depth. A grid brings with it the expectation that there is an underlying system based on reason and calculation; but these grids are pure intuition. By denying this expectation, I hope to bring tension to the work. The idea of a dynamic grid came from studying the late buildings of Louis Kahn while I was an architecture student.
The grid comes from the idea of drafting. The parallel rule and triangle are the basis of traditional drafting, and they are the support on which many other geometries can also be built: curves, diagonals, perspectival constructions. I wanted to use just grid – vertical and horizontal lines only – to build compositions that contained curves, diagonals, and depth. A grid brings with it the expectation that there is an underlying system based on reason and calculation; but these grids are pure intuition. By denying this expectation, I hope to bring tension to the work. The idea of a dynamic grid came from studying the late buildings of Louis Kahn while I was an architecture student.