What brought me to Olga’s Potato printing is the connection she made to her cultural background. Olga gave a considerable amount of time to choose the word she was going to print. She decided to print the word Minsk, as this is the city where she grew up and has a special meaning to her. When choosing my word, I brainstormed a few five-letter words, but I also wanted to select a meaningful word to me. I am a very optimistic and positive person, my husband actually believes that in my mind everything is rainbows and unicorns. So I chose the word SMILE, to me this is a very powerful word, as it can make or break your day a simple smile or the lack of one.
Olga documented her process of creating the stamps beautifully, and provided a history background to how the English alphabet goes back to the original alphabet invented in Lebanon in 1700 BCE, I personally didn’t know this information. It was interesting to me how through her process she started to see the letters in terms of straight lines, and how our ancestors might have appreciated the simplicity of their shapes. During the process of creating my own potato printing, I also connected with the idea of the elements that form the letters, straight lines and curved lines. Olga connected this with our ancestors carving the letters in tablets, whereas I connected this with how children learn how to write letters by identifying how to use straight lines and curved lines.
Olga’s process seems to be very well thought out, and methodological. It looks like she got it at the first try! Unlike me, Olga chose to carve the whole word in one potato, my approach was a letter per potato. One of the challenges that I encountered was that I didn’t pay attention to the importance of “upside down, left to right” form the short film about letterpress, and as excited as I was to start stamping some of my letters were backwards. The letters “i” and “l” didn’t get affected, but the letters S,m, and e, I had to carve again, interestingly enough the letters with curved lines were the ones that I had to redo. After all the process of creating these potato printing words, I agree with Olga to be in an era where handwriting is remediated by print technologies (Bolter, 2001).
References
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
