Second Week of Collagraph

In the second week, I began to finally prepare the first collagraph to print. Exploring the concepts related to “shoebox”, I spread my old childhood belongings onto an unfolded shoebox and played around the placements of each object to convey emotions of nostalgia, reminiscing the purity and freedom I had as a child. Objects such as my old phone case, glitters, fake flower, ribbons, small stamps, Korean coins and cheap, broken earphones brings back my childhood memories, both good and bad parts of it. The way they are simply scattered and jumbled in the shoebox area shows they are forgotten and uncared for, yet the imagery of them stored in a shoebox also implies they are something worth or meaningful to be preserved.

I wanted to express the freedom that I had as a child through the objects freely moving and spreading across the surface. Managing each object was bold when some had to be cut and destroyed in a form that can be run through the printing press. Only the wires of the earphone were used, the rubbery part of the stamp was taken off the wood and I dismantled the flower and arranged each part as a whole.

After the arrangement, I glued the objects onto the cardboard. There are some parts that I intentionally damaged the cardboard surface with a box cutter, in the corners. This was to express the hurtful memories and physical and mental scars that I got when I was little.

Then I covered the cardboard with plastic sheets so the glue won’t get on this press:

I used the press to evenly flatten the surface and help the objects to stick onto the cardboard.

One unexpected thing was that the glue got onto the plastic sheet and ripped thin layers of the cardboard when the sheet was taken off. Yet I liked how it portrayed torn and damaged areas of the cardboard surface, so I kept it, hoping these textures to be printed as well.

Then I shellacked the whole thing. This was the first layer of shellac:

I waited for about 15 minutes to dry, then applied the second layer.

Finally, I applied all three layers of shellac on the front and two layers for the back and this is what it looked like, ready to be printed: