Worcester’s Amanda Kidd Schall: Storytelling Through Art

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Jeffrey Starr, GoLocalWorcester Contributor

Amanda Kidd Schall, hard at work, telling her story.

In a brief artist's statement, Worcester's Amanda Kidd Schall remarks bluntly about the reason she got into art and, more specifically, why she uses the specific mediums she chooses to express her creativity. It's about telling a story, combining fantasy and reality through confronting the past.

"My work exists at the intersection of my childhood experience and a fairytale," she remarks.

"I use sculpture and mixed media to confront my early feelings of abandonment and to live out my fantasy of running away from the unpleasantries of my youth. Installation allows me to physically engage with the process of story-telling."

As Friedrich Nietzsche once famously wrote, "you need chaos in your soul to produce a dancing star."

Schall appears to prove this correct. Though she comes from a family of creative types (her mom is an actress; her aunts are artists and writers; her brother is a poet), she has sought to develop her own little niche, different than the rest, since graduating from Clark in 2011.

Schall's Style and Medium of Choice

She says she's obsessed with printmaking, but she also works with textiles and fibers, collagraphs and lithography. She especially enjoys the process of making "plates", through multi-layered monoprints. She describes this complicated process in detail.

"I start by preparing a plate, say a dry point etching, by scratching in my design, then I go to print a collage from images from vintage nature books into my prints using a process called 'Chine Colle'. So even if they are printed off of the same plate, they have different collage pieces." In other words, every piece is inevitably unique.

"Chine Colle" means "china paper", and it is basically attaching a thin paper to a heavier weight paper.

"In this case, " she goes on, "the thin paper is the nature book images and the heavy paper is my printmaking paper. In the end pulling the paper back is always a grand reveal."

She adds she's never quite sure how things will come out. But she loves experimentation.

"In some ways printmaking can be really scientific, what will result from using this paper with this ink? How about wet or dry paper? More pressure, less pressure? I am starting to keep a log of all of the combinations I try so I can look back and see what is successful."

A Cast of Characters

Most importantly, the "Chine Colle" method process of printmaking best allows Schall to accomplish her goal of telling a story, combining the fantastical and the real.

"It allows for a constant cast of new characters, while the setting of the narrative stays the same," she says.

She describes one print in particular, where which she used an entire page from a book on birding with a drypoint etching of wildflowers printed on top, which evokes a nostalgic feeling of meadow wonderings. In another print, using the same etching, she "chine colled" images of tiny birds in tiny bird houses living in the wildflowers like trees, which conjures a scene from a fairy tale.

As you can probably figure out, her work is mostly inspired by nature, or more specifically, how we as human beings interact with nature, the relationships we build with the world around us, both historically and now.

"I like to think about Victorian ladies wandering through manicured gardens, and early American botanists collecting and documenting plants they happened upon, and how it fits with my own walks around Worcester where I collect weeds and wildflowers for use in my callographs and drawings," she says, dreamily, once again relating the past to her art.

For the future, she just hopes to keep experimenting and learning new techniques in printmaking. She would love to be a part of a larger community of printers and wishes to start something like that here in Worcester. Worcester, of course, is the ideal place for such a community.

"I know so many talented artists in the area, but we are not organized, especially young artists. One of my favorite things about Worcester is the low cost of living, which allows for more time making art and less time working. It's perfect for artists!"

This future looks bright, as Schall continues to find inspiration in the past.

For more information on Amanda Kidd Schall and view some of her work please visit her website.