OUTSIDE IN EXHIBITION CATALOG | 2024
The California Printmaker | 2023
Changing Gears
I have the honor of being included in the 2023 issue of The California Printmaker. This esteemed journal is published by the California Society of Printmakers.
This year's journal focuses on the artistic process in printmaking and how shifting directions in midstream can change the art and what it conveys to the viewer. Contributors are from Spain, Canada, Austria, England, Bulgaria, and the U.S.
The California Society of Printmakers (CSP) is the oldest continuously operating association of printmakers and friends of printmakers in the United States. CSP is a nonprofit arts organization with an international membership of print artists and supporters of the art of fine printmaking. CSP provides professional development opportunities for printmakers, and educates artists and the public about printmaking. New members are admitted by portfolio review. Friends and supporters of printmaking are admitted by fee. CSP is based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.
For online viewing and print purchase
CLICK HERE
View PDF
Kristina Nobleman’s monotypes create a world of shadowy, mysterious beauty. Through continual experimentation, she has found her way into a unique expression of her past and present influences and experiences. One discovery has led to another: from working with textiles as a fashion designer to the intuitive arrangement of fiber on an inked plate, its open weave creating a rich texture, to her manipulation of the Japanese printing paper with which she feels a special affinity.
Nobleman became an artist after having spent several years as a designer and then as an arts educator at the Textile Arts Center, New York. Her approach to making prints, shaped by that deep experience with cloth—everything from weaving to sewing, draping and tailoring-- involves manipulating her materials in order to generate images that are abstract, yet suggestive at times of the natural world. There are hints of smoky landscapes, astral events, or even lightning in a summer sky
In each series of monotypes included in this show, she collaborates with both paper and printing press. Her manipulations include wrinkling, crumpling, rolling, folding, and stitching, among other things. Each unique work is what’s called a ‘ghost print,’ that being the image that results from the second pass of an inked or painted plate through the press. Her first pass is made with a layer of burlap, laid over the inked surface, that she alters in places by pulling threads or opening the materials’ coarse weave even further with her fingers. The fabric is then carefully pulled away, leaving behind a flowing, net-like pattern. Once the fabric is removed, the plate goes through the press once more, but with the inked surface covered with a sheet of kozo. This Japanese paper, prized for its strength, translucency and powers of absorption, is made from the long, flexible fibers found in mulberry leaves. In the past, Nobleman tried using cotton-based Western papers traditionally used in printmaking, but it wasn’t until she discovered kozo that everything fell into place. Access to an oversized press at an artist’s residency she attended made it possible to create work on a panoramic scale, a major shift in Nobleman’s work.
Handling the large sheets of the thin, lightweight paper was a challenge at first, and a wrinkle happened by accident. Yet, rather than being a problem or a mistake, this print became the first work in a series of images in which Nobleman deliberately created multiple wrinkles, or ‘cracks,’ as she called them, investigating the ways in which they could be created or even controlled. In Crease, she pleated and squeezed the paper, resulting in a field of roughly parallel cracks. In the Unfolding series, inspired by origami techniques, she folded and refolded sheets, putting them through the press multiple times until each area had received a unique inked texture.
In the series called Fractured, she used an even thinner paper, called sekishu- a tissue normally used for the conservation of books or works of art. Where the delicate material tore, she mended it with leftover scraps, creating a scatter of small rectangles that are clearly visible in the finished works. Nobleman likes the idea that this special paper ended up being used in the way it was originally intended, as a medium for repair.
For her, these pieces are a kind of homage to the practice of boro-- the Japanese art of textile repair. She has also experimented with another technique developed by Japanese textile makers, called shibori. Sometimes used in tie dying, this method involves stitching & gathering the material so the dye or, in this case, ink can’t penetrate. Astonishingly, the kozo—thin, yet strong and flexible—holds up through all of these operations. Nobleman embraces the unknown every time she unfolds, unstitches or unfurls a sheet of paper- experiencing a moment of surprise and gratification that only her adventurous approach can generate.
A group of small collages included in this show are partly a product of Covid-inspired ingenuity. Without access to a printing press, Nobleman started to experiment with reusing her old prints and scraps of textiles. In pieces like Pyrocumulus, Smoke, or Singe, stacked scraps of cloth and paper stained with washes of ink are stitched together into reductive landscapes. Titles like these are reminders of the fiery destruction that became omnipresent in northern California in 2020. For Nobleman, however, the importance of these collages is that she was able to find a way to recycle her own prints--in a kind of restorative reuse, when repair was deeply needed-- at a time when artists everywhere were forced not only to labor in isolation, but to find new ways to do so.
photos: Jack Simpson Photograhpy