Interview with Katie Bonadies, July 2024
Hannah Babcock is a printmaker who is starting to dabble in fiber arts and drawing and mixed media. She has been a RWS member since Winter 2023.
Hannah prefers to make woodblock prints and etchings to other forms of printmaking due to the protracted nature of the woodblock and etching processes, respectively. She loves the labor of these forms of printing and it was the indirectness of the process that initially drew Hannah to printmaking. The distance created between the initial inspiration and the end result gives them more opportunity to create with intention, “Printmaking is the art form you go into if you’re creative and ‘Type A’, and that’s what gelled for me is that there is this technical perfection you can achieve while still fostering creativity.”
Repetition in her practice is central to Hannah’s process. Hannah writes before she starts sketching, looking for the recurring themes and words as a way to identify what she really wants to say and create. Then she arranges ‘blobs’ into a composition and sketches each element separately so that she can create multiple iterations before bringing them back to the composition. Working this way allows Hannah to come to a block or a copper plate with a plan so that the transferred image is truer to what they want before they put a carving tool to the block or etching needle to the plate. Hannah prefers transferring the image onto the block or plate because she can modify the sketch without marking the block with pressure lines that would be revealed during printing, even lines that aren't carved. Once she starts carving, though, everything ‘goes out the window’ because it happens so quickly, which she thinks may be the result of working under tight deadlines in college.
Intaglio, or copper plate etching, is Hannah’s favorite type of print to make. The process feels core to her because of the time and care that goes into creating an etching. She wishes she could be a more comfortable screen printer, but the immediacy of pulling the image feels wrong to her. Woodcutting and etching are risky forms of printmaking in that every aspect has high stakes, which is part of the appeal particularly with woodcut, “Once something is gone you can’t put it back, especially when you’re doing a multi-layer reduction, taking away and taking away and hoping it works out.” For her thesis Hannah printed 4’ x 3' blocks that were all reductive onto sheets of fabric and applied stitching and applique onto them. When her advisor recommended trying something experimental with one of them, she felt protective because she knew that if anything went wrong she couldn’t make a new one. She believes being risk averse holds her and other people back, “But when you do lean into that and it’s successful it feels like the coolest thing in the world.” She hopes to overcome that fear in the right moments.
The goal of her prints is to foreground sensitivity and emotion and intuition over logic. Hannah attributes this focus to growing up a sensitive child with two older siblings. “A lot of people in general feel like rationalism and logic should always prevail over how you feel and I think a lot of why I was interested in art when I started taking classes in college was because that wasn’t how the art world worked, or making art worked, and there was this heavy foregrounding on intuition and on a subjectivity that I found really appealing.” Her ultimate goal is to create work where emotions can exist and enable this sensitivity in the viewer, both towards themselves and to others. Hannah feels that if they can make someone else feel something it doesn’t matter whether they understand the work or not.
Figures were Hannah’s main subjects as an undergrad and being able to represent herself and others through drawing was an exploration in how emotion is physically embodied and how our bodies carry things. She took a lot of classes in Gender Studies, History, and English, which has informed the art that Hannah makes. The sensitivity she talks about was fostered by studying women and gender studies on gender intimacy and violence. She frequently depicts parts of the human body, namely hands and anatomical hearts, in her prints. The hearts are a literal symbol for the sensitivity she experiences and hopes to evoke in others. She jokes that for her next sewing project she’ll sew an anatomical heart onto her sleeve. The hands in her prints symbolize reaching for something and touching for something or someone, and they are frequently depicted dipping into water in her work.
Hannah grew up in Portland and went to college in Minnesota, which felt far away from the ocean. Water droplets started appearing in her work and she loved how she wasn’t sure if they were rain drops or water drops or tears because she missed home. Her school was on a river and she would walk there and sit on the bank and imagine that the river was turning into the ocean and back again in an effort to convince herself that they were the same or coming from the same place, “I did come to love the Midwest for what it was, but I could never be comfortable not being by the ocean.” Landscape informs how Hannah feels and she thinks this is a result of being away from the ocean and trying to find it in other things.
They graduated a year ago and work on their feet in the service industry. It has been hard to make work, but they feel like they are starting to make up for the deficiencies by finding the right spaces and moments to be back in their practice. Sometimes she finds herself in a cycle of needing to create but not having enough time to plan and trying to be less hard on herself, “Getting the ball rolling is a slow and arduous process that’s worthwhile, and now that the sun is out for longer I feel that itch coming back”, especially after being on a creative schedule that coincided with the academic calendar. They are feeling much more motivated to get back into making work.
As a practicing artist, Hannah is finding their process is slowing down, which is an uncomfortable feeling for them. She is much more critical of her ideas and some don’t even make it to the sketching phase. Her process is especially important now that Hannah has graduated from college and has to balance her time between work and making art. She also has to be more considerate of the cost of the materials, “I don’t just get to open a drawer that magically has a bunch of copper plates in it anymore.” She had started to treat her materials much less precious as she reached the end of her degree, and now that she’s working independently the expensive materials have become precious again because she doesn’t want to waste resources or time. This experience is leading to a crucial moment wherein she feels she just needs to create again and not overthink it.
She hasn’t worked figurally in a while and recently sketched a lot of winter landscapes. Now that the weather is nice again she can carve outside, which she loves. She is working on a self-portrait, “It’s the first real print that I will have tried to accomplish post-graduation, and I think I have one block.” She’s hoping to work reductively and is trying not to stress about it because printing feels like what Hannah is supposed to do in the sense that she loves everything about it, “In such a self-centered way, so much of art is grappling with yourself and how you see the world and you want to put that out into the world for other people to see.” She loves that she can tap into these traditions of printmaking. “I think there’s something magically human about art,” and that is what calls to Hannah.
Contact Hannah on Instagram @sculptingstitchingprinting.
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