I speak dialects now: ol’ country, bodega, and rabelaisian.
I grew up a couple of blocks away from this artery area. Right by the freeway, on Airport Way, in this industrial port city. Stockton is where one rests their collective tools for this long, overseas journey ahead.
They are ingredients for liberation. Helping artists to create here. Skills to build for movement makers. To print and publish soul-reachers. Access to tools, creating networks of collaboration, with valuable data.
The Suminagashi Workshops held here in this artery area extended on the geology of Stockton’s wind aeolian processes. Co-instructed and built in March of 2024 with Tiffany Pech, HATCH Residency Coordinator, we combined our organizing efforts, and visual arts background to run two workshops for a large collaborative printing session in my hometown of South-side Stockton CA.
Rocks placed in the water vat, originally built for housing tiles, lined with plastic—created currents, toned with a slab of copper. Stone wash and sun erased minerals were used as natural weights for drying the hand-pulled washi prints.
Surface slip-streams seemed to bend the Black African soap and Southeast Asian lime water as the aqueous effect gave way to a peculiar efflorescence. Each ‘streaking’ of ink on the surface foregrounds the vellum-like water bath. Hand-crafted brushes from our hair shaped symbolic ritual, attaching itself to a broken branch from a recently chopped Oak tree.
Bound by copper wire, gradients formed readily, and deadly in collective formation. Each student responsible for the emotional content their marbling would have on this floor culture workshop.
The ensemble of students served their ways of bending water, ink, and wind as artery lines, key drops, and compass points—casting carbon and sublimations onto water. Sinuously delicate, with an all-over glow. Marking the critical, cellular citations of stone, metal, and water.
I liken Suminagashi to pin-pricking the baptismal surf of cosmic chaos. I joke that I’m a double fantasy aquarium landscaper. The recognition of media fatigue, and technology through surface treatment all retreat as one’s eyes readjust to what is exactly in front of them. For me, it’s the tensioning of vision within the field of chiasma. One becomes the slip-stream in this impermanent transparency.
Students got to see how building layers of color, ink, and gesture encoded quick feedback. They arranged for certain relationships to take place, with interpenetration of the paper by listening, and reading with their hands.
The act of raking downwards, the last step, was key to what could be. Using a tautly pulled piece of paper, we downsampled the ink design to a sharpened reductive graphic, as the raking reduced the coverage, and the multi-colored inks converged in new and unexpected ways on the surface of the water.
Small square pieces of multicolored origami paper were used for its last baptismal surf. Each hand-pulled print was unique, collecting as much of the frayed ink.
Prints were then dried on stackable, formerly baker’s trays that stood together with wheels, allowing for proper airflow, and mobility from outside terrain to inside storage. The resulting, finished stack recalls digital pixels, and like gleeful chefs piping hot biscuits from the oven, we broke bread with some excellent art.
Passing the test.
Special shout-out to Jacqueline Bahnsen, ceramics specialist, for helping to organize the administration of the workshop, as well as assistance with documentation on printing day. Elazar Abraham, executive director of HATCH Workshop, for the opportunity to build here, alongside his last minute strategy for drying prints. It came together seamlessly, as it all were, in the nick of time.
Tiffany Pech, for coordinating this residency, large scale collaborative printmaking for our build-out, and archiving of this wonderful program. We did that~!
I’m tuned in. Looking forward to coming back.
Linda Zeb Hang Stockton CA 2023-24 HATCH Workshop Artist-in-Residence
