Peters Valley Residency, part 3 (printing)

This is Kerr Grabowski, a wonderful artist who gives great workshops. She invented a technique called Deconstructed Silk Screen. You can read all about it at http://www.kerrgrabowski.com/dsp.htm.  Even if you understand silk screen printing, deconstructed printing is not intuitively simple. So I'm not going to try to explain it here. Just let's say that the technique allows you to have images on your screen, which you can print several times, each print falling apart a little more than the last.

Kerr taught this technique to my friend Rayna Gillman. Rayna showed it to me. I came up with the idea of using a thermofax screen to print an image on the silk screen and then deconstructing that.  Yes, extremely confusing. But it was great fun when Rayna introduced me to Kerr, and I was able to show her my variation of her technique.

So, going to Peters Valley, my plan was to master this variation of Deconstructed printing. I printed:

Here is a piece of crochet sewn atop a deconstructed print of that crochet.

The lettering here is deconstructing - each print shows a little less of the letter (look how the top letters are empty!)

Quilt yo-yo's and tape lace are sewn over their printed images.

A photo of clothespins, made into a thermofax screen, printed on to a silk screen, and deconstructed on to damask linen. 

And because I never know when to stop, I tried doing deconstructed discharge, letting discharge paste dry on the screen and then printing on dyed cloth. I ironed that one outside in high wind, as great toxic clouds blew off. I won't do that one again, but it gave some interesting results:

I printed on silk (bronze dye printed on silk has an incredible gold edge!) on cotton and linen. I tried every possible variation to my variation. I created a wealth of printed material that I still haven't completely exhausted, all these years later.

So that's the color, the framing and the printing. Next week, you'll see the results in my Domestic Archaeology series .