Spoon&Sailor: Elana Wetzner’s Letterpress Artistry
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
GoLocal caught up with Wetzner this week, in the midst of thank-you-note season.
What's your background, and what brought you to letterpress work?
I have a BFA in photography from MassArt and after graduation I taught photography, ceramics and general art around Boston for a number of years.
I've always loved old objects and old technologies - especially old books - so while living in San Francisco for a stint, I took a letterpress workshop at the San Francisco Center for the Book and IMMEDIATELY fell in love with letterpress printing. From there on out, I grabbed every opportunity I could to learn this centuries-old craft.
I attended grad school at RISD where I graduated with an MFA, plus a Certificate in Collegiate Art Instruction from Brown. Now I teach at Rhode Island College & CCRI when I'm not running the presses at Spoon&Sailor.
In such a cyber age, talk about the relevance of letterpress cards.
I think that in a strange way, the persistence of cyber-relating and digital hands-off art-making is actually amplifying the need for the creation of tactile and hand-crafted goods. Everything in cyberland is so perfect, polished, and can be distributed consistently and in identical visual form by the click of a button or by sharing a link on someone's Facebook page.
I feel that this type of relating makes people crave something real - something that can be held in the hand, touched, and create the physical mark left by the printing process. You can glean a bit of the story of the making in itself... and through the act of actually mailing this card to a friend rather than sending a link to an ecard, the story is both repeated and continued.
What inspired you to do the RI-themed cards? And why postcards?
Those cards were for the maiden voyage of the Ladies of Letterpress's "Greetings from..." postcard swap!
About 125 different women printers from around the world created 125 copies of a postcard representing the city or state that they live in, and we all mailed them off to one awesome organizer who then mailed each of us a package of all 125 unique cards. It was great fun!
But then I received such great responses to my cards from friends around Rhode Island that I printed up a second run of them and folks can now buy them on my etsy page or at Queen of Hearts Providence.
See all of Spoon&Sailor, here.
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