linocut print: A Powerful Culture
August 10, 2020 6:42 PM   Subscribe

linocut print: A Powerful Culture
I took snapshots and wrote up some process notes and overall motivations for one of my most recent linocut blockprint works, "A Powerful Culture", which is based around the 1993 Sandia Labs report on long-term nuclear storage messaging (warning, beefy PDF).

I've been doing linocut work since late January of this year and am really enjoying it, and I've been incorporating text more often in my art work in general the last couple years, and this is the intersection of those two and, as I talk about in the blog post, a complicated mix of feelings about this point in history and the idea of planning for a future where we care for people we'll never meet.

I carved this several weeks ago, and finally started pulling prints of it yesterday afternoon; I bought a small etching press in the interim, which has made it possible to do said printing without destroying my shoulder the way any significant amount of hand-printing with a baren does.

I also did some live tweeting of the printing process yesterday, focusing more on navigating that printing process in earnest for the first time. Having a press is great! And intimidating! And complicated! But mostly great.
Role: everything
posted by cortex (5 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite

There's great danger in imagining one's nation to be inevitably, every-justifiedly the future; there's a contrasting humanity in being able to imagine being the past, being history, and looking with care towards those who follow after.
THIS THIS THIS.

A great piece, a compelling writeup, thank you.
posted by brainwane at 5:32 AM on August 11, 2020


Wow, you're really rowing the boat out here cortex. Amazing and great to see your process.

I'm working around to doing a question on the US flag on meta as from the outside non of us understand the reverence of a something that is a symbol of all that is bad. If you fly a flag here you generally get the side-eye.
posted by unearthed at 1:10 AM on August 16, 2020


Finally an answer to my 2016 ask.me!
posted by moonmilk at 9:18 AM on August 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


Cortex this art resonates with me deeply, thank you for this. It is excellent.
posted by Meatbomb at 11:00 AM on September 13, 2020


I know this is pretty old, but I read some parts of the report last night, and had a bunch of thoughts about it, so I decided to write them up here.

I'd seen the quote in your print before as sort of a meme, but I hadn't read the actual document it was from — thank you for spurring me to do that!
posted by wesleyac at 6:22 PM on October 16, 2020 [1 favorite]


« Older Mixolumia...   |   "Cruiser" is a strong word for... Newer »


You are not currently logged in. Log in or create a new account to post comments.