It all comes together through process

The first show at PRESS this summer features the work of Alke Groppel-Wegener, MCLA Hardman Family grant awardee who spent part of January and May working at PRESS and with MCLA students. Alke mined the tradition of mantras at PRESS to create this inspiring piece:

Process Doesn’t Get You…by Alke Groppel-Wegener

You can see this and more of Alke’s work during her exhibit at PRESS What’s your Mantra? An Exploration of Academic and Creative Mantras during June and July. Alke not only explored mantras but how they help form and mold one’s identity. Different mantras work for different parts of our lives. To demonstrate this, she carved a linoleum block with a fingerprint. She transformed her prints of the fingerprint through weaving, collage and other manipulation. Through the process of weaving, cutting and collaging, she contemplated the five primary identities she holds, [artist, teacher, researcher, writer, designer] considering them visually.

She invited me to take prints of her fingerprint linocut, to think about the question of identity and transform the prints to represent me. I listed all the ways I identify myself:

How to represent all of these ways I identify? I struggled to make the fingerprints work for me. Ultimately taking water and gesso to them to conceal a good portion of them then layering collage elements plus many little dots and pathways. I look at these five individual pieces that come together to form one larger piece as a conversation between the different parts of myself. I see the birds, dots and pathways my different identities and how I move back and forth between them. Sometimes quite seamlessly, other times with much distress.

Identity Combined by Melanie Mowinski

One of the exciting parts of this next exhibit is that the viewer will have the opportunity to take one of the fingerprints and do the same thing. Make sure you come by PRESS beginning June 26th to take part in this creative exchange.