Breakup Letter/Poem

Breakup Letter/Poem

Nathan Henry

Art in all its forms holds within it the history of its making and the history of its maker. Whether it is the strokes from the hairs of a brush trapped in the paint of a painting or the tool marks on a sculpture, artwork holds a physical representation of the artist at work. More often than not artwork holds the personal history of the artist as well. The subject matter, composition, and other aesthetic decisions all point towards something within the artist, something that may be directly or indirectly expressed.

Printmaking as an art form like painting, sculpture or drawing holds true to these things as well but there is something that is always a little more personal with printmaking, something a little more visceral. Maybe this is because, unlike the other art forms like painting or drawing, just about everything that exists makes prints one way or another.

Leaves will leave stains on a sidewalk, animals leave prints in the mud, human beings leave fingerprints on everything in fact it seems to me that part of being alive is to print. A print in its simplest form is a mark made by pressure. It is the pressure that makes a print is so much more rich and complex than that.

Pressure is the exertion of physical force on an object by another object. This kind of pressure is an intrinsic part of making a print. There are no forms of printmaking where pressure of this kind is not used to make a mark. It would not be a print if it were otherwise.

There is another kind of pressure that is also intrinsic to printmaking that many people do not see and that is the psychological form of pressure.  Printmaking is used to persuade and influence you to buy things it is used to intimidate or persuade you into believing things. Printmaking comes into its own in this manner, advertisement, propaganda, story telling. Pressure is what defines a print and often these two types of pressure leave traces of in a physical way that remain embedded in the making of the print.

Right now you might be asking, how does the psychological form of pressure leave a physical trace? Fossilized footprints left in ancient mud, tell a story of travel, this travel through that place was obviously necessary in some regard or the footprints wouldn’t be there. Ancient hand prints stenciled on walls in caves tell a story of personal connection to a space and a sign to other human beings that the hand belongs to someone else, that the space is connected to the artist which made the mark. It’s like writing John or Mary was here. The leaf that stains the sidewalk echoes on long after it has turned to dust. Printing is nature’s way of transferring the information of life’s pressure, both physical and psychological, through the physical medium of the material universe.

The light box I have created has been made with a piece of silk screening fabric cut from an old silkscreen frame that was going to be thrown out because it was torn.  Everything I have proposed above can be found in this piece of fabric. Over time the screens become stained with ink and the history of the silkscreen and its various artists can be read by looking at that stains.

This screen in particular was very interesting to me because rather than having what one might consider to be “artwork” or rather visual art there is either a poem or a love letter writ large, stained into the screen. Some of it is unreadable but it appears that it is a former female IUSB students break up letter/poem to a lover.

It Reads: “(Unreadable)…be a good woman…(unreadable) want for you to be a good man… will be leaving…(unreadable) this is why I can’t see you no more…(unreadable) miss your heart so tender…(unreadable) will love…(unreadable) love forever…(unreadable) bad woman…(unreadable)…you be a bad man.”

This is IUSB history. It is the story of an anonymous student and her relationship. Who was she?  Who was the lover? Why was she leaving? Why was she printing a break up letter or poem this large? There are so many questions to ask. The screen tells and entire story. There is loss and leaving, a desire for something better for themselves and another person. Behind it all there is life’s physical and psychological pressure and it is echoing into the future like the stain of a leaf on cement, the footprint fossilized in mud, or the stenciled hand on the cave wall.  Someone was here, someone was moving on, some thing dissolved at this point.  And now it is pressing itself upon you and leaving a lasting impression.