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Printmaking/ Drawing |
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Kathelene Engrid Gallowayclick image to enlarge
The Belted Galloway’s Suite This work was made possible in part by Eastern Oregon University’s Faculty Scholars and Sharing the Learning Grants Program Making art is for me about examining and translating my world. I am an artist who draws. Whether I am making prints, working with dry material or in paint I have a mark-making mentality. The mark is the residual of my action, which under the best conditions etches away a space for viewers, including myself, to think. In the article “Herbert Marcus and the Subversive Potential of Art” from the book The Subversive Imagination, Marcus is quoted as having seen the imagination as a place of “recombining experience” and this is where my latest work begins. My intention in this work is to erode the glossy façade photographic histories constructed around my understanding of family while exposing my perceptions of family and memory. The source material I am using is my Mom’s collection of images and documents. They were kept by her but never filed or cataloged chronologically or kept in any form that made sense beyond her. The collection is an unsolvable puzzle that gives only hints as to its historic significance. My hope for this artwork is that it gives one a sense of the old boxes containing layered image histories that have been shuffled by many hands over time. The Belted Galloway’s print suite is my attempt to communicate my relationship to a history I know mostly through snapshots and objects as opposed to personal experience. The photos and my family interacting with them create their own history, memory, and story. My parents told stories of Germany, joking and laughing, then speaking German when I was not to understand. Concealing information about the Kruger’s, my Mothers parents, stretching the truth about her role in Hitler’s Youth, and partial stories are core in my understanding of family and especially to my understanding of my Mother’s German heritage. Speaking German provided a screen behind which my Mother concealed her past in my presence. Most often my many questions about Germany and the related images and artifacts were met with threatening distain and ultimately went unanswered. In extreme contrast the Galloway side of my family is very well documented. My Dad was an armature photographer who experimented with black and white, hand color, and color techniques. He documented our very conservative Galloway family history carrying a camera to every one of the many family events that all the Galloway’s were expected to attend. The cousins, aunts and uncles all captured in snapshots are marked with notes. Between my personal family histories there is an uncomfortable divide. There are the Galloway’s who have family reunions and books about our heritage and then there is the Kruger side, which has remained mostly concealed, left behind and denied. These prints are a meditation on the people, family history and my memory of my life shared. They are an attempt to explore printmaking in the same carefree manner in which I draw. They are a collaboration combining my Dad’s photographs, my snapshots and other images with a wide variety of handwriting (mostly by my Mom) as well as forms and documents and my own marks. They are solar photogravure monotype prints combined with graphite, shellac, serigraphy and are collaged with eyelets. The eyelets physically and conceptually hold the work together. Referencing the eyelets that hold the images of my Mom in her passport and her other German travel papers. In every case her image is held in place with two eyelets one in the upper corner and the other through her chest as if piercing her heart.
La Grande Observer Article- Book Cover Art La Grande Observer Article- Techno Art with 8th graders Oregon Ink Spot Internation Print Exchange
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| Eastern Oregon University Art Department | ||||
