Anna Szul Horizons

Malaspina Printmakers is please to present Horizons, an exhibition of photo-woodcut prints by Anna Szul.

Horizons is a series that builds upon Szul’s metaphoric use of specific land formations common in the costal landscape, moving from the solid formations in the land to the ineffable spaces at the edges of perception. Previous bodies of work have focused on the form of the island as both a formal structure and a space of poetic imaginings. Photo-etched images evolved through erosive procedures that wore away the copper plates, merging text and image until barely discernible from each other, mimicking processes of inscriptions related to experience and recollection upon the surface of memory.

In Horizons, Szul’s focus moves beyond the tangible structure of the island to a space in the landscape that is ungraspable and unattainable. The horizon is the apparent meeting of the surface of the earth and the sky; a description of a space that can only be perceived but never accessed. Further the space only exists in relation to an observer’s place on the earth. Echoing the transformative power of nature, Szul weathers her plates through potentially destructive means such as the hammer.

As the recipient of 2009 Visiting Artist Residency, Szul gathered source images for the prints while hiking the West Coast Trail, a 75km-backpacking hike along the southwest coast of Vancouver Island and then returned to Malaspina’s studio to developed Horizons.