A New Look at Woodblock
Wren Sieber
Woodblock printing is one of the oldest mediums of communication design. Historically woodblocks produce highly detailed imagery to visually illustrate accompanying text. My work explores and pushes the boundaries of woodblock printing through abstraction and documentation of process. I focus on concepts such as color, the abstraction of form, and motion. The use of rules, digital design, and laser-cut technology were integral for the energy of the printing process to speak for itself. The projects of this work include a series of twelve laser-cut blocks used to document overprinting (black and color) in a series of posters, a stop motion video from stills created by printed woodblocks in both black and color, another poster series used to document suicide, or reduction printing (where one block is cut, printed and then re-cut and printed in another color to create a more complex image), and two entirely hand-printed books to document the larger body of work.