February 17-23, 2005

art

Block Party

carving a niche: While in Japan, Katie Baldwin learned a rich visual language to use in her woodcuts, like the higan-bana weed in the untitled work at left. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Printmaker Katie Baldwin finds beauty and duality in a remote Japanese town.

by Lori Hill

Within three months of arriving on Awaji Island on Sept. 11, 2004, Katie Baldwin was beating sheets of pulp with sticks to create handmade paper and witnessing not one, not two, but four typhoons.

"I've never seen anything like it in my life," says Baldwin. "Our residence was on a hill, and the road turned into a river. You couldn't stand on the road without getting washed away. There were landslides all around."

These were perhaps the most dramatic differences between being a printmaker in the United States and being a printmaker in Japan.

Baldwin, an artist who lives in Powelton Village, spent three months at Awaji's Nagasawa Art Park as one of six artists-in-residence from all over the world selected to study the art of traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking.

Which means, in the midst of all the driving rain and fierce winds, Baldwin was working with one of the most delicate and natural artistic processes.

Woodcut is the oldest and perhaps purest form of printmaking, dating back as early as 1400 A.D. The artist carves a design into a plank of wood along the grain, then cuts away at the remaining surface, creating a relief. After inking the raised surface of the image, the wood is pressed onto a sheet of paper to create a woodcut print.

Japanese and Western woodcut techniques are unique. Baldwin was used to oil-based pigments and solvents, grained paper, broader carving and the final step of running the paper through a press. At Nagasawa, she used unsized, ungrained paper, water-based pigments, animal skin glue (nicawa) and rice paste (nori) mediums, more specific carvings and transfered the image to paper with a baren, a tool made of coil and bamboo leaf.

"It was so much more sensitive," says Baldwin of the Japanese process. "Depending on how much nicawa or nori was used, the way the plates were inked, how much moisture was in the air, the dampness of the paper," all had an impact on the final product. About that homemade paper: It was harvested from trees on a mountain near the studio using homemade tools. The studio's water also came directly from a mountain source.

One particular image crops up over and over again in Baldwin's Nawagasa work: a dark red, gangly silhouette of a flower — a weed called higan-bana that grows in rice fields. "In the area where I was in the fall, they're everywhere," she says. "All the visitors think it's beautiful, and the Japanese think it's ugly." Baldwin says its "harsh" color and its being a weed gives the plant a negative connotation almost like a bad omen. One man told her that the color reminds Japanese of bloodshed and war, especially a field full of them. "Except when grown around the edges of a field," says Baldwin. "That means there's a water source there, and it's desired land."

"That's what fascinated me most about my time in Japan," says Baldwin. "I found all these dualities in everything, the weather, the economy, the way the town dealt with it all. My images and text come from seeing these two sides."

After being selected for a Nagasawa slot by a jury panel through Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Baldwin received a $2,000 Window of Opportunity grant from the Leeway Foundation to help alleviate her travel expenses and the cost of printmaking materials.

"They had this attitude of, "We're bringing you here because you want to learn this, to bring your perspective, a different energy, to what this medium can do. And we want you to take it away from here and teach others,'" says Baldwin. "To me, that was a very open and giving environment. I mean, we're not masters," she says, laughing.

A native of Snohomish, Wash., Baldwin has lived in Olympia, Wash., Texas and Montana over the years and studied sculpture as an undergraduate at Evergreen State College. She later came to printmaking by chance and experimentation. She was hired to assist a printmaker with classes, and, eventually, "I just started cutting woodblocks on my kitchen table," she says. A business trip to Philadelphia introduced her to the University of the Arts' master's program in Book Arts and Printmaking, from which she graduated in May 2004.

Baldwin currently makes a living juggling several jobs and projects — working at a coffee shop, teaching drawing to high schoolers through a program at UArts every Saturday, a project at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., various contract printing jobs.

Thirty-five years old and a single mother of a 13-year-old, Baldwin says she's always concerned with being financially stable. Still, she seems to have a knack for finding situations that make her artistically and monetarily happy. "I apply for [opportunities] all the time, like 20 things a year," she says. "I get maybe one out of 10." She says she applied for many different fellowships and residencies around the time of her graduation from UArts, and wound up having to choose between Nagasawa and a yearlong, paid residency in Italy to teach printmaking.

"It was really tough," she says. But in the end, Nagasawa "was more what I needed to know for my art." Knowing this pared-down woodcut technique, she says, enables her to work without needing expensive equipment and studio space. And with a goal to do more international work, preferably teaching young people, this seemed the perfect choice. "Teaching printmaking when [students] don't have facilities to do it on their own kind of sucks," she says. "I wanted to learn this to show people so they could do it on their own."

As part of the Philadelphia Print Collaborative's The Big Block!, public art project concentrating on woodblock technique, Baldwin will give a slide lecture tonight at Space 1026. She'll show images of her own work, as well as pictures from her trip, including some of the Japanese artists in the process of creating prints. Some of the work Baldwin created while at Nagasawa is on view at 1026 in a show called "Careful" (Julie Ahn, Brielle Duym, Talia Greene and Candice Vivian are also represented).

"I never had such a positive artmaking experience," Baldwin says. She says that after having to evacuate the print studios during the typhoon, and being so dependent on the community for transportation because of the remote location, "we all became really close."

Despite the trauma, all of this reinforced her love of international experiences. "It was the first time I'd been around people from so many different countries in one place," she says. "I now have six friends from different countries, plus Japanese friends, who would all have me come back anytime."

Katie Baldwin slide lecture/Q&A, Thu., Feb. 17, 7 p.m., free; "Careful," through Feb. 26, Space 1026, 1026 Arch St., 215-574-7630, www.space1026.com.