Press

John Caperton, “‘Accomplish that Creative’: Hester Stinnett at Kelly Weber Gallery,” 2008

David Kessler, “Transcriptions,” film and interview

Gerard Brown, “Breaking the Waves: Hester Stinnett’s Prints,” The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA, 1999

John Ravenal, “Twenty Philadelphia Artists: Celebrating Fleisher Challenge at Twenty,” The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1998

Accomplish that creative: Hester Stinnett at Kelly Weber Gallery

by John Caperton

While the works in Transcriptions, Hester Stinnett’s latest series of prints, are both visually dense and technically complex, her hand in the making of the work at first seems to be quite light - they appear to be direct replications of snippets of writing from existing texts. In Over the commonplace, for example, we see what appear to be two sheets of paper joined together. On the left is an enlargement of a quickly scrawled note, the paper worn and creased as if it had been found crumpled at the bottom of a pocket. On the right, beautifully drawn lines mark out text written in the penmanship of a different time. In this series, as in much of her earlier work, Stinnett embraces chance and the use of found material as part of her process, relying on the grain of a piece of wood, or the way ink floats on water, to determine the final markings of a print. Many of the works she has made over the last ten years include written texts that were not made by the artist at all, but by her mother while she was descending into a dementia process. Made only for herself, these notes, with their lists, diagrams, and reminders, show someone struggling to make sense of the world. These notes are seen here as well, but for the first time Stinnett has combined them with another text, the hand-written manuscript of an essay by Joseph Conrad.

Conrad, the Polish-born English novelist, wrote the Preface* to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” six months after he completed the manuscript for that unfortunately named novel. (In fact his American publisher insisted on changing the title of the book because he thought no one would buy a book with the word nigger in its title.) The novella is a swash-buckling tale of the high seas, but Conrad recognized it as a critical achievement in his development as a writer, acting as a bridge from his earlier adventure-based writing, to his mature masterpieces—including Heart of Darkness, written the following year. The Preface is Conrad’s artist manifesto, and has become one of the best-known statements of artist’s purpose in modern fiction. In the essay, Conrad compares writing to the other arts and implores writers to aspire to be true to the “visible universe,” to use the “power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel... before all, to make you see.” Despite its dated vocabulary and syntax (there are several convoluted sentences discussing plasticity in the arts), the Preface is a powerful read, and Stinnett, who has taught at Tyler School of Art of Temple University for more than twenty years and mentored scores of young artists struggling to describe their intent as artist, felt an immediate connection between her work as a teacher and the Preface.

Despite its final polish, Conrad’s essay did not flow effortlessly from his hand, and his difficulties with it are quite clear in the original handwritten manuscript. This remarkable autograph is in the collection of Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library and was shown to Stinnett by their assistant librarian, Greg Giuliano. The document is heavily, almost frantically, edited; many pages are virtually black from wavy lines that cross out entire paragraphs of text. Some passages are piled with as many as four lines of corrections, making it easy to lose the flow of his argument. With its emotional pronouncement of the role of the artist and its beautiful illegibility, Stinnett knew she had found the inspiration for what became this impressive series of prints.

These works were created through a process where enlargements of the passages are transferred onto inked woodblocks, then printed. In each work, snatches of text from Conrad’s Preface are juxtaposed with the words from the notes written by Stinnett’s mother. Usually each source is presented on its own panel, with the two panels then butted up side-by-side, or one over the other. And while it is hard to make out any narrative meaning moving from left to right (or top to bottom), we nevertheless try, finding links and rhymes in the texts, and where there is no apparent connection between the texts, we find links visually. In And pity, the panels contrast Conrad’s “becomes evident” with her mother’s “pe-ru-sal,” both suggesting reading or looking. In Accordingly, the two panels are linked by their completely marked-out texts. But the marks they made could not be more different and as Stinnett put it, “The touch reveals the thought.” Her mother’s edits are hasty and unsure, scratchy and impatient, while Conrad’s marks are fluid and confident, playful, almost artistic. At the same time, Conrad’s writing feels like a continuous stream of thought, running out of his hand effortlessly, even the revisions seem to come easily. With her mother, each word seems to show effort—the script is inelegant and the words purely functional to the effort at hand. In Over the Commonplace, there is less struggle in the five stacked lines of Conrad’s corrections, than in her confused and manically rewritten S’s at the start of the word “stroke.”

Stinnett notes that her mother and Conrad “are similar only to the degree they are different from us... both seem equally removed from the quotidian consciousness we usually inhabit.” It is also obvious that the texts themselves were made for very different purposes. Conrad knew that he was writing for the public, while her mother was making personal notes; Stinnett considers them “direct transcriptions of unguarded thoughts meant for oneself.” They speak much more than they were ever meant to.

The simple system of juxtaposing the two texts falls apart in Discard Ideas, the climax to the series, where the two sources flow into each other’s panels. Conrad’s writing extends across the top––we see the words “more profound” and “forgotten” emerging out of a mass of heavy black edits. At the bottom, in her mother’s uncertain hand, the word “epergne” (a silver basket often used as a center piece) is written. Stinnett’s mother, who owned an antique shop and would have come across obscure fine things with forgotten names like this, made notations suggesting the word’s pronunciation—first “apron,” which is replaced with another approximation, the more obscure “apern.” We can only guess why the simple system that held for the other works has broken down in this one. It suggests that a simple comparison of an artist arriving at genius and a woman losing her mind to confusion, with their obvious connections and heart-breaking differences, is not the story this series is telling us. We have to remember that this is not a correspondence between these two writers; the real agent of this series is neither Conrad nor Stinnett’s mother—they are being read here, and rearranged, and made sense of, by us.

If Discard ideas is the climax of the series, then Sincere endeavors to is the conclusion. In this work, the two writers both offer exhortations: Stinnett’s mother cryptically encourages (“Come up / Crepe myrtle”) while Conrad unsurprisingly commands (“accomplish that creative”). And here we see that the series is not a comparison of confusion and genius, it is about the struggle of transcribing something from the real world into something that is art. This series questions how much an artist can control their material before it is no longer a reflection of what Conrad called the “visible universe.” In her work, Stinnett has repeatedly shown that the only way for an artist to accurately bring the real world into their work is to acknowledge that the world is constantly shifting, its meaning slipping away as quickly as it seemed to arrive.

John Caperton is the Curator of Prints and Photographs at The Print Center, Philadelphia.

*Facsimiles of Conrad's manuscript of the Preface courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia, PA with special thanks for their assistance to Bill Adair, Greg Giuliano and Karen Schoenewaldt, PhD.

Transcriptions

Video courtesy of David Scott Kessler

Breaking the Waves: Hester Stinnett’s Prints

The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA

by Gerard Brown

I get vertigo thinking about Hester Stinnett’s work.

It is like the sudden awareness that in the building where you work there are people working on all the lower floors. Layer upon layer of people in a building live out their lives, occasionally communicating with the layers above and below. So it is in the multi-layered world of Stinnett’s prints. But here, layers are woven together into images which spill over one into the next and cast light on one another. Here, it is as if the floors are glass and we can see all that's going on downstairs.

Stinnett employs the Japanese suminagashi or “spilled ink” technique in her work. By floating a thin layer of ink on the surface of a pool of water and then laying down a sheet of paper on this shifting matrix, she records a single unpredictable and unrepeatable moment of fluid movement. The earliest examples of suminagashi are found in the Sanjurokunin Kashu, a thirty-six volume anthology of poetry given to the Emperor Shirakawa on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1118. Suminagashi artists traditionally manipulated the ink membrane on the meniscus of the water bath by breathing or using a stylus to inscribe unrepeatable rippling patterns. Instead, Hester Stinnett’s delicate curtains of gray result from unpredictable variations in surface tension and fluid dynamics that often record the rumblings of passing trucks outside her South Philadelphia studio.

From its origins in 12th century Japan, suminagashi has been connected with calligraphic poetry, and while Stinnett’s prints are, on one level, about skimming a precarious surface and arresting a single moment, they are, on another level, narrating recent personal history. Within the veils of suminagashi appear enlarged samples of the artist’s mother’s handwriting. These constricted scrawls—often entirely illegible—are screened onto the paper using clear varnish that resists the suminagashi printing and show as white. Consequently, we read lines of occasionally decipherable text in the veils of gray. These veils, like clouds or smoke curling away from a fire, suggest images—here an enlarged area of the skull, there a fleeting glimpse of a shooting star—into which text has been magically inscribed.

Poignantly, the text derives from notes and letters written by Stinnett’s mother as she endured the gradual and painful process of sinking into dementia. The reversed letters and repeated words in her mother’s once meticulous writings chart the trajectory of her dissipation and come to stand for her conscious struggle to remain tethered to language, and through that slender thread, to life itself. These images, combined with fragments of text that reflect the struggle to live within a radically changing situation, therefor encompass a larger discussion of chance, one which the artist describes as “an intermingling of meaning and confusion, of proactive or reactive interventions where purpose is confounded by unplanned delights.” A formulation to which one might add unplanned sadnesses as well.

A third layer of these images is composed of wood block or screen-printed shapes, which occasionally include recognizable letter-forms. In these, Stinnett may take clues from the imagery and text of the preceding layers. A fractured star created from blue and black wedges appears over a tide of ink that suggests a comet. Elsewhere, a rectangle is divided into an arch and a half-moon. This curved shape turns it back on the arch’s embrace. These shapes—cut from the same cloth, as it were—can be visually re-unified, though their pieces cannot be made to fit together on the page.

In the end, Stinnett’s abstract images seem precariously balanced between gliding on the surface and going under. Like water bugs who linger on a plane investigating its textures and riding its gentle waves, we cannot forget that the miracle by which we skim this surface is inextricably tied to the deeper mysteries it conceals. These mysteries are dangerous, frightening and unpredictable.

Philadelphia, Oct. 17, 1999

Twenty Philadelphia Artists: Celebrating Fleisher Challenge at Twenty

The Philaelphia Museum of Art

by John Ravenal

Over the two decades of Hester Stinnett's printmaking  career, her work has evolved from elaborately carved black-and-white woodblock prints of imagined landscapes to abstract, experimental monoprints. In her work from the early 1980s, she invented scenes of fields and forests, inspired by memories of her grandfather's loblolly pine tree farm in Louisiana. In 1987, however, Stinnett began to move away from representational imagery. She started making monotypes (each a unique print) by inking wooden planks, some carved or gouged, others left untouched, and printing them by rubbing with her hands or with spoons and other tools to create irregular imprints. With their prominent wood grain and narrow, vertical plank forms, these austere, architectonic images retained a connection to her earlier tree imagery. But in these improvisational works Stinnett had made the crucial step from depicting an object to printing directly from it.

Over time, Stinnett became aware that she was relying on repeated devices to resolve her compositions. She wanted to retain the act-and-react method underpinned this series while still finding a way to subvert her imposed control. Stinnett's studies of John Cage's work, in particular his incorporation of chance as a creative strategy, provided a key to this process. Around the same time, in 1991, Stinnett discovered suminagashi, an ancient Japanese technique for marbling paper by dipping a sheet into water to pick up the ink rotating on the sur­face. Because the pattern of the ink is highly sensitive to such environmental variables as temperature, vibrations, and humidity, the paper captures an unpredictable moment as it hits the water, thus making a permanent record of a dynamic process.

Stinnett used little or no intervention in earlier early suminagashi prints, which suggest natural processes of growth such as cell division or tree rings. As her working method evolved, she began to insert woodblock-printed images, whose deliberate, manufactured character created a dialogue with the organic suminagashi images, thus making evident the interplay between chance and decision. Subsequently, Stinnett started to explore how her interventions and the unpredictable suminagashi could occur simultaneously rather than sequentially. She would first print images on paper in clear varnish, whose invisible presence would be revealed by the suminagashi process, a  convergence out of the artist's control.

For her printed imagery, Stinnett first used organizational structures-including a computer map of the Andromeda galaxy and an old chart from her father 's school showing the flow of students between rooms- and photograms of string and twigs. More recently, she has printed snippets of handwriting made by her mother as she suffered through dementia (see plate 19). A meticulous note writer and recordkeeper, her mother continued this practice throughout her decline as she struggled to main­tain control over a radically changing situation. Within a note or even a single word, her handwriting would change from clarity to total confusion. Stinnett understood these notes as being parallel to the dynamic she was seeking in her printmaking. This was underscored by the knowledge that when suminagashi was invented in the twelfth century, poets and calligraphers used its appearance of spontaneity as inspiration for verses on changes in everyday life and the passage of time that they wrote upon the primed sheets. Stinnett imagines her use of her mother's notes (and those of a family friend) as a similar collaboration between chance and control.

¹ Letter to the author, September 9, 1997.