鍥而不捨 Perseverance
Tags: Adobe InDesign, Book Making, Flag Book, Linoleum Carving and Printing, Daily Practice
鍥而不捨 (qìe ér bù shě), Perseverance, is a Chinese idiom that literally translates to carve without giving up and alludes to perseverance. This pub- lication documents my journey of self-learning to carve and print linoleum over the course of 90 days. The envelopes contain images of my sketches and carved linoleum blocks, an original print, and the prints as stickers. Learning to carve linoleum has been on my to-do list for the longest time, and when I was presented with the oppor-tunity to document a daily practice, I jumped on the chance to learn a new skill. My goal was to enjoy the entire process as much as possible, and thus, I decided not to pre-plan what I would carve before beginning this three-month journey and spent time each session sketching out a design instead. I did not want to limit myself to a certain amount of time for each session, so I recorded how long I would spend on each step of the process. I found myself increasingly spending more time on my daily practice to procrastinate on other tasks, but also as a form of stress relief. During each sketching, carving or printing session, I would record my initial and post moods, a reflection of the process, my general thoughts, and the time stamps of when I began and ended the activity. This data is printed on the back of the cards inside the envelope. The consistent carving and printing led to learning through physical movements and the gradual fine-tuning of those movements to obtain neatly-carved lines and cleaner prints. I spent printing sessions experimenting with mixing colors and combining various ink and paper colors, learning about the materials I was working with. Most importantly, being off the digital spaces and working with manual printing was therapeutic, meditative, and healing.
Over the course of the 90 days, I carved 21 blocks. Here are some of them:
Process: Images of my sketches and blocks.