Louisa Rorschach

A selection of pieces from my undergraduate thesis, a body of untitled work, originally exhibited in Cossitt Hall at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, April 2011.

This group of prints represents the culmination of a year-long investigation into my love of tree imagery. Using 15 different woodblocks, each carved with a unique composition of silhouettes, and inks modified for high transparency, I created multi-layer monoprints that explore my favorite visual subject: trees.

As a natural follow up to my undergraduate thesis project, (in white) reverses my earlier process in a brief series of monotypes. Instead of carving trees into wood and printing the negative space in muted tones on white paper, I used white ink against moveable mylar stencils to print onto pigmented papers.

Small and simple, these prints provide an intimate peek into fleeting moments of natural atmosphere.

This group of reduction woodcut prints is a continued homage to my favorite subject: trees. I find their colors and forms fascinating at every angle and in every season. Their forms evoke feelings of welcome, of loneliness, and of peace.

I push myself to simplify how I see into lines and contours so I can cut them into wood, then I complicate matters by breaking down an image into layer after layer of color. I can’t resist the challenge to add another color for hues of nuance, or cut in more details for more visual interest.

The carving and printing of these reduction woodcuts can take anywhere from 25 to 250 hours of work per edition, depending on block size, number of colors, intricacy of the woodcut, and the size of the edition.

In the grand artistic tradition of appropriation, I borrowed these images from other artists and made them my own through the process of relief printmaking.

I enjoy the challenge of translating a multicolored image, or a three-dimensional object with gradients of light and shadow, and replicating it on paper with a binary of black and white.

I’ve never enjoyed drawing on paper, but this method of seeing something and reproducing it on paper—with a carving tool instead of a pencil—grabbed my interest completely.

For centuries, Tarot has been used as a method of divination and spiritual guidance. It grew from the 15th-century deck of playing cards: four suits, with ten numbered cards and four court cards in each; and added a fifth group of 22 cards representing “big ideas,” such as the Fool, the Sun, Judgment, and Death. The imagery on each card is highly symbolic, and serves to clue the reader into the deeper mystical meanings held within.

My interest in Tarot has always been as a tool for introspection. The ideas and challenges that each card represents are helpful lenses through which I examine my own behaviors and attitudes, forcing me to see myself in ways I otherwise might not.

What started as a direct mimicry of the Smith-Waite-Rider deck’s four knights, the cards I design now combine traditional symbols with more personal imagery.

This project is a work in progress.

In Catharsis, I combine printmaking, song, and video, to process and make sense of a failed relationship. Created over the span of seven years, the project utilizes three print processes––traditional stone lithography, photolithography, and risography––an album of musical covers and spoken narrative, and a short film. Together, these create an immersive experience that forces the viewer to engage with both the humor and the heartbreak of my experience, and then confront how they tell their own relationship stories.

The eight chapter printed narrative relates the true events of a Dallas/Fort Worth airport layover bar crawl with the ex-girlfriend of the guy I was in love with my senior year of college. The base text is childishly written, sloppily illustrated, poorly printed, and then harshly edited in red pen. The naiveté of the narrator’s voice, the cynicism of the editor’s notes, and the final setting within a curated multimedia experience are three voices in a conversation. They speak as three aspects of myself interacting with this relationship across ten years.

This project is a work in progress.