Title
Creation Date
2019
Preview
Medium
reduction print
Description
Dimensions: 20 x 16 inches
Rights
© Jess Leigh Tornga, 2019.
Keywords
printmaking, reduction paint, double exposure, self-portrait, woodcut, relief print
2019
reduction print
Dimensions: 20 x 16 inches
© Jess Leigh Tornga, 2019.
printmaking, reduction paint, double exposure, self-portrait, woodcut, relief print
Artist Statement
My work as a printmaker focuses on a sense of changing identity. Reduction printing highlights the fact that you can reproduce an image but it’s limited, it’s an original and a reproduction and finite while creating a sense of the self as shifting, intangible, and temporal. Once you carve the next layer you can’t go back, you can’t recreate who you were and you can’t undo the material carved away. With each step you are definitively left with what you’ve done and what you have left to do.
A lot of this focus on identity is rooted in need for approval and validation, because I’m a fucking human. Balancing a need for approval, a strong appreciation for my specific boundaries, and an acceptance with who I’ve been and how I’ve lived is an ever-changing process that doesn’t work the same way for me day to day. Distinguishing between how I’m feeling and how I think of myself is hard but allows me to recognize that I’ll always have days that I feel like shit but that I am no less myself and no less valuable on those days.
Learning to be comfortable with the process of existing is weird and expecting it to be anything else makes it suck.
Counseling is magic. Go to counseling.