Linocutting

Kristina Kapeljuh

April 21st, 2021 4:41 min read 1289 words

It was not love from first sight, oh no. It is bulky, messy and clumsy, with pure absence of sophisticated details. One single wrong move and three days of work are gone. With a bold line crossing all effort. But it was always here. Always. In the shortest days of winter and the longest days of quarantine, linocutting has been my creativity saviour. When all other printmaking methods were under the locks of restrictions, linocutting was sitting on my desk.

Yes, a spoon was not the best tool to substitute for a press. Yes, my hands were covered in cuts and linocutting flakes, by the magic of unknown physical laws, are traveling even into my food. And all of this was worth it. In this clumsy bulky process I had a sense of material work done. As basic and simple as this text, linocutting gave me a chance to stop staring and sharing the screen for a moment. It helped me to remember an almost forgotten sense of physicality in the process of printmaking which I used as a key method of my visual communication, that the pandemic seemed to vanish away.

Linocutting made me realise that restriction of the quarantine is yet another lens through to find alternative methods of creativity. I found myself not alone in this position. Correspondence Collective has created an entire physical exhibition on the anniversary of the lockdown on the theme of restriction. This is where I felt my linocuts can belong – in the tiny pockets of numerous letterpress drawers alongside amazing artists proving that imagination always finds its way despite the circumstances. The work produced for the exhibition in Somerset is worth visiting, in thousands of tiny pieces maybe you will find my little clumsy linocuts here.