February 1 - 28, 2010

Amanda Caldwell

 I live in St. Thomas, Ontario and am a university of Western Ontario graduate, with an honors bachelor degree in Visual Arts, a Graduate Diploma in Arts Management, and am currently completing a bachelor of Education.  I have been a practicing artist since September 2006, working primarily in relief printmaking.

            My art is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of landscape spaces. The design process divides the landscape into shapes but the printing process rebuilds the landscape through the layering of colour. This creates something familiar but precarious, as nature is, and comments on the beauty and destruction of natural spaces. For me, the printmaking process is symbolic: as many of these places are being destroyed, my art-making process allows me to put them back together, building them piece by piece. But there is always the moment of realization that the reconstruction is symbolic, and in reality all we have left are these reconstructed images and not reconstructed spaces.

What is Relief Printmaking?

Using knives and gouges, the artist cuts away lines and areas from a linoleum block. The artist rolls ink onto the block and the ink adheres only to the surface, skipping over the cut-away areas. To print, the artist places paper over the inked block and applies pressure with a printing press, transferring the ink to the paper. The print is a mirror image of the marks on the block. The block can be printed as many times as the artist chooses. To print the next colour, the artist cuts away more of the linoleum block and repeats the inking and printing process, printing directly on top of the first colour printed. This process of cutting, inking and printing can be repeated many times to achieve multi-coloured relief prints. Depending on the number of times the artist prints the block, an edition of prints is created and numbered (eg. 1/6) but all prints in the edition are original.