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Photograph by Karl Reeves
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The first time we headed out to interview Ewa Budka, it was right after rush hour; we drove through Florissant at dusk, getting lost in the twilit world of car dealerships, atomic ranch houses, and half-lit strip malls. The following day—with the benefit of daylight, not to mention a mood-upping temperature shift into the 60s—we finally found Paul Artspace, where Budka is artist-in-residence till April 16.
Paul Artspace is a bit magical; you’re driving past donut shops and ’50s churches and suburban lawns and then you hang a left and suddenly you’re on a country road that you’d be more likely to encounter, say, out in Missouri wine country. Then you inch your way down an even tinier road, passing skinny young trees and animal statuettes, finally rolling into the driveway of a 1960s ranch house surrounded by fairytale woods. Because of that nice weather we mentioned, Budka had the garage door to her basement studio wide open when we arrived. She cheerfully ushered us upstairs to the dining room, where we talked about her work, including her one-weekend exhibit, which opens tomorrow at Hoffman LaChance Contemporary Gallery.
Appropriately enough—we will explain why in just a moment—that dining room table was topped with unfinished blonde wood, all its whorls and grain plain to the eye. Though Budka works in a number of mediums, including graphic design and bookmaking (you can see the huge breadth of her work on her website) she’s in St. Louis thanks to her printmaking practice. If there is a god of printmaking, it’s not a surprise it would bring Budka here—St. Louis is a printmaker’s town, home to nationally known printers like Tom Huck and Peter Marcus, pioneer of large-format printmaking. (Budka has plans to visit Yellow Bear Projects and Pele Prints, both of which have oversized presses on premises.)
Budka has mastered a little-known printmaking technique called Mokulito, a Japanese process that uses plywood as a printing matrix in place of lithographic limestone. She began experimenting with it as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, after her father, Józef Budka, a respected lithographer and professor in her hometown of Katowice, realized lithography stones were becoming obsolete, and began looking for an alternative.
“The story starts three—well, maybe four years ago,” Budka says. “In America, it's very popular to do plate litho, but in Europe and Poland it's not that popular; so my father was trying to find something more organic. What is the most beautiful part about litho is the stone, and the human hand. So that's where he came to find Mokulito, the technique we are using. We were together at an exhibition, and we saw prints, and they were lithography on wood. And my father was like,’Lithography on wood! This doesn't make any sense.’
“He started Googling it and Googling it, but there was not so much information,” she remembers. “The technique came from Japan 15 years ago—it was Seishi Ozaku who created it—and he's the master of this technique. There is one university where you can try it, and we didn't go there, but we contacted them, and they gave us a small catalog, and said, there's some information in it.”
It was pretty bare bones, though, and their first experiments didn’t work. She remembers one Christmas Eve where her father’s studio was just filled with plywood; he’d been obsessively trying to get the wood to produce prints, which it refused to do. So she took some plywood back with her when she returned to Warsaw after the holiday break, and started trying all kinds of different things. Then, almost at the same time, she and her father began getting some results from the technique. Budka made enough progress that by the time two American professors visited in 2012, they invited her to come to their school, the Milwaukee Institute of Art, on scholarship. Her only obligation during the semester was to continue to experiment with Mokulito—and lecture and teach the technique to professors and students.
Ewa Budka "Research of Mokulito" from Whitty Remarks on Vimeo.
It was also during her trip to Wisconsin that she was introduced to lithography master and University of Missouri-St. Louis art professor Jeff Sippel, who wanted to do a Mokulito demo at the Southern Graphics Council International conference, which was to be held in Milwaukee the following spring. (Sippel served as Tamarind Institute for Lithography, “Which is like mecca, mecca, mecca—the best place ever for litho!” she says.)
Budka says Sippel had been trying Mokulito for a while, with no success. The two American professors she’d met in Warsaw asked: can you give him a Mokulito demo on Skype? She says that during that Skype call, she kept pulling her prints out from under the table, and he couldn’t believe how much success she’d had with it. “I told him, well, I can show you, and he invited me [to St. Louis] for the first time, and we collaborated together. I did a lecture, showed him the technique.” Eventually, Sippel invited Budka to co-present at the SGIC conference. The pair gave a very dynamic and well-attended workshop that pretty much knocked everyone’s socks off. (You can get a recap here, as well as a step-by-step description of how Mokulito is done.) Budka’s dad even flew in for the conference. She says he could hardly contain himself; he kept jumping in and telling her what she should do next. “He just loves printmaking so much!” she laughs.
This all happened just a few months before her graduation--with Rector’s honors--from the Academy in May 2013. The work she produced in Milwaukee, “The Skin I Have Been Living In,” became her master's thesis. It included a series of abstract, beautifully expressive prints; carved plywood plates, which she dubbed "bodies"; and casts of "skin," made of liquid latex poured over the wood. ("The Skin I Have Been Living In," is also the title of the show at Hoffman-LaChance, though only works on paper will be shown as part of that exhibit.)
“I started to feel like this is just like my body, like a human thing, and had so may stories to tell,” she says of the wood she was printing from, adding that each kind of wood has a totally different personality. “I was printing it on the Japanese paper because it has this kind of structure like a skin. It’s very see-through, and as I was taking up the prints from the wood, it was a strong a thing for me, like this is really a skin.”
She also relates this work to her 10 years as a fashion model, where her body and skin were her materials, and where she often felt like she was doing a sort of performance art. Her dream is go to Japan and learn Mokulito in its place of origin, where they’ve figured out how to do weird and interesting stuff—like integrate milk into the printing process. She says she and her father describe what they do as “Budkalito,” but adds the original process couldn’t be all that different. Ultimately, she says, it’s a process that requires being present, and being OK with improvisation and unpredictable results, whether you’re doing it the traditional way, or the Budkalito way.
“This oak today,” she laughs, “didn’t want to collaborate with me! It was making some funny results. I can tell already when I’m doing it if it’s going to work or not. If I buy the wood at Home Depot, I don’t know who’s touched it, what its stories are. I don’t know the tree. I don’t know where it existed, what water it was drinking. The wood is very unpredictable. But wood is a body, and every body is different.”
"The Skin I Have Been Living In," opens Friday, February 28 with a reception from 6 to 10 p.m. The show will be up for one weekend only at Hoffman LaChance Contemporary Gallery, 2713 Sutton, 314-960-5322, hoffmanlachancefineart.com.
