Cut To Length, solo exhibition, Furnace Art on Paper Archive, Falls Village CT, April 29- May 28, 2023
Cut to Length
Exhibition essay by Julia Silverman
Janis Stemmermann prompts viewers to consider printmaking not just as a medium or process, but as a logic of engagement with materials. Cut to Length, an exhibition comprising sculptures, vessels, and works on paper, extends the artist’s longtime fascination with creating spaces that blend natural and domestic materials and forms. Combining processes from ceramics, printmaking, and woodwork, Stemmermann explores overlaps between organic forms found in nature and anthropogenic image-making practices. Her practice collapses distinctions between traditionally siloed artistic disciplines, developing novel working methods that create dialogues across media.
The work in this exhibition is inspired by transferware, a process that dates back to 18th-century Europe. Initially created as an industrial substitute for hand painting on ceramics, the process involves printing a design on paper from a copper plate and using the paper to transfer that design onto clay. Applying the logic of intaglio printmaking to ceramic decoration, these transfers enact a print process whose final form moves beyond a work on paper. By employing the printed paper as a matrix, an intermediary step to transport ink from plate to ceramic, transferware articulates an alternative understanding of a “work on paper”: not necessarily a final medium, but rather a critical step in the technical process of creation.
Stemmermann interrogates this process through both her imagery and through her treatment of materials. Transfer Quad, Transfer Parenthesis and Transfer Cylinders, sets of rounded ceramic vessels shaped by the outer surface of tree cuttings and printed with grain patterns from its flitches, serves as the most direct reference to transferware. Yet, there is nothing direct about the process used to create them: block prints of planed wooden pieces are converted into printing screens. Then, sheets of newsprint are screen-printed with underglaze in the wood grain pattern. To maintain a congruence between the wooden print and its matrix, the screen prints are all enlarged by approximately 12%, to account for the eventual shrinkage of clay during firing. The printed pieces of newsprint are covered in wet slip, a watered-down form of clay which aids transfer process and, finally, the printed image is applied to the body of unfired clay vessels. In short, vessels that appear to exhibit a straightforward moment of contact between inked wood and clay, are actually the result of several intermediary steps that blur boundaries between print and ceramic practice. Relying on newsprint as an agent of transfer, these works extend the definition of “works on paper” to include works whose final forms don’t include paper at all.
Prints, in the more traditional sense, do make an appearance: Cut to Length, a series of small works printed directly from the flitch, bear traces of layered color that reference the glazing process. Surface and Structure Stack and Surface and Structure Thicket translate this effect to an environmental scale. Printed on large sheets of Okawara paper with a baren–a hand tool used in Japanese woodblock printing–rather than a press, these prints offer an immersive experience of pattern and color by combining the natural patterns of wood grain with those created by Stemmermann’s own organization of the wooden flitches. Together, Stemmermann’s works all share an acute attention to the dynamics of surface and structure that, in itself, constitutes a form of “printerly” thinking. After all, the press is an inherently haptic instrument: in intaglio processes, physical divots and scratches on the plate’s surface hold the printers’ ink. In woodblock printing, an image of woodgrain is created through capillary action, as the wooden matrix unevenly absorbs ink. Using wood as a subject calls attention to the interplay between botanical structure and the surface of a printed page; the ghostly imprint of woodgrain almost allows a viewer almost to see through wood’s opacity altogether.
A final set of small-scale Nestled sculptures illustrates this type of surface-thinking in three dimensions: comprising pieces of cut and treated firewood with glazed ceramics nestled into their carved crevices, these sculptures almost act as large-scale diagrams of an intaglio process. The wood, in this analogy, becomes the plate, a structure to guide the flow of ink; the glazed ceramic becomes that ink, temporarily filling in the gaps of the surface, but ultimately independent of the plate, waiting to be rolled through the press and transferred to paper. The fit between ceramic and wood isn’t necessarily easy: to create the sculpture, Stemmermann must negotiate between wood’s hygroscopic propensity to shape-shift and clay’s to shrink in the kiln. But these negotiations appear in all print processes: deformations of paper’s fibers, negotiations between the pressure of the press and the integrity of the plate. Often unnoticed in a final print, these material tensions are scaled up in Stemmermann’s sculptures.
Print, in Stemmermann’s work, is not just a studio-based relationship between matrix, ink, paper, and press. Instead, her works translate print into an experiential and immersive environment that inspires a more expansive understanding of the process. Prints comprise both intentional, handmade marks and those resulting from natural forces and processes that occur both within and outside the studio. Moving between specific media, print becomes a logic transferable across artistic processes. For a viewer, it becomes a new vantage for looking at and living with objects.
Julia Silverman
PH.D candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She researches craft and design in the 19th and 20th centuries.