Profile: Pattern Play

By Yolande Norrs

written for Printmaking Today

Vol 27 No 3 Autumn 2018

PROFILE Painter-printmaker, Dionisia Salas, plays with a vibrant colour palette, layering print techiques to develop hypnotic, energetic patterns writes Yolande Norris

Print is fascinating and versatile. It’s punk to prestige, and everything betweenm able to sit back, shout forth or marry with other mediums. At times, as with Dionisia Salas, traditional print modalities collide with an immediacy of the hand in work that is altogether fresh. Throughout her oeuvre there is a breadth of approaches, but the assertive constants of colour and surface, layering and pattern have all the allmarks of print in a painterly package.

Born in 1982 in Darwin, Australia, Salas spent her early life eclectically, living in Alice Sprints, Dubbo and Botswana, before arriving in Newcastle where she made early forays as an artist. From there shje sets her sights on the Australian National University’s School of Art in Canberra, where she studied painting and graduated in 2007.

Canberra is a unique situation for artists and indeed those who are drawn to print. Megalo Print Studio and Gallery, established in 1980, is arguably un paralleled in its facilities and reputation at the forefront of print excellence. The School of Art and Design has a renowned printmedia department, and the flow of artists between it and Megalo is free and fruitful. Then there are the national institutions, in particular the National Gallery of Australia, being custodian to the Kenneth Tyler Print Collection - ‘the most comprehensive collection of post-war American art outside of the United States’.

That all said, Salas’ first proper introduction to printmaking didn’t come until she had left Canberra to set herself up in Melbourne. Antonia Aitkin, a printmaker and long-time friend, encouraged her to apply for a residency at Megalo, knowing that the painters pre-occupation with rich and saturated colour was a surefire sign that the medium would appeal,

Her application successful, Salas returned to Canberra in 2011 for a six-month residency at Megalo. She recalls it as a period of invaluable artistic support, mentorship and licence to grow from a point of almost zero knowledge. In fact early in the residency, having no real idea what a print was, Salas decided to look at painters she admired who also made prints, such as Frank Stella and Helen Frankenthaler. Assuming they must be in overseas cpollections she was shocked to find a huge holding on her doorstep, at the National Gallery of Australia. In the collection study room of the instituion Salas poured over the works to find them all richer in the flesh.

Salas’ 2011 exhibition skun young magic showed the bold progressions afforded by this time. Print elements dovetail with bold lashings of paint in pours and patterning that is almost architectural. Colour begins to pop and vibrate in staccato stipple, line work hovers and washes bleed into the paper ground. These image fields are all energy, magnetic and pulsating or Roschach and hypnotic.

Back in Melbourne again, away from the facilities of Megalo, Salas brought print techniques into her own studio: rudimentary screen printing, even boot prints onto her canvases, printing ‘badly’ - loving the bleed, pulling ink through paper cutouts until they disintegrated. By now, she was finding her stride, and a license to incorporate diverse techniques and mediums to up the creative challenge.

With each relocation, each new studio or workspace, Salas takes the opportunity to clear the decks, start afresh and make way for the new. The detritus from the previous bodies of work - including printed scraps and remnants are boxed up to be revisited when the time is right. So begins a period of structured ‘play’, trials and experimentation, and a lot of ‘wasted paint’. Problems present themselves, resolutions begin to emerge.

Given the synesthetic qualities of her work it is perhaps unsurprising music is ever-present in the studio. It fuels and feeds momentum towards a ‘plateau’ zone of fluidity between mind and hand, process and vision. Filmic influences, also deeply impressed upon her subconscious, emerge in the work. Salas cites the mise-en-scène of Pedro Almodovar, his sense of colour and pattern play, as a recent example that motivates her layering and palette.

Salas was in Melbourne for only a short while before she was offered an opportunity for a studio and house-sit in Berlin. It became a three-year stay, including a 2012 residency at the Basso Studio in Kreuzberg. Intimidated by fronting up to a fully-functioning German print workshop as an experimental amateur, and limited by dwindling funds, Salas renewed her focus on painting, but knew the print-making influence was merely in hibernation.

Sure enough, screen printing and painting enmesh in works on paper throughout 2014-15. Back in Canberra and given access to the screen-printing workshop at the School of Art, Salas bulk-printed at every opportunity, to ensure a steady supply of print matter was on hand.

As her practice grows the artist has found multitude ways to preserve, even cultivate, the gestural freedom that is integral to her work. She doesn’t work in multiples, wanting each piece to have the freshness of a unique state. Instead, printmaking is a tool to replicate mark, allow it to travel through works.

In 2017, under the mentorship of Aitkin, Salas investigated this further with a new approach to woodblock. Lind drawings were minpulated and stretched on a photocopier, then sent through a computer programme that reads and precisesly laser-cuts the image from wood. The sweeping, delicate whorls are then printed at scale. Alonside the woodblocks Salas added paper marbling to her arsenal, teaching herself via YouTube tutorials. With its flat but fluid and saturated colour, the marbled paper forms a perfect ground above which collage elements tumble, remnants from previous print series.

The woodblocks are central to Salas’ ‘rules of engagement’: an approach wherby she sets up rules and formulas for each body of work and tasks herself with making the piece successful within that structure. First there would be the marbled paper, which frames a woodblock and rectanular print (or two perhaps). Then on top would come lighter or more playful mixed-media elements. In this way the images are all related and cohesive, despite being born of experimental process.

By untilising print matter from her own stash/archive it was possible for Salas to keep wirking despite intermittent access to facilities. By this time Salas was also raising a young family, and her practice had to flex to find ways to maintain. The smaller -scale works of 2017 made it possible to work at the kitchen table and pack away in time to put dinner out.

In the face of these new challenges, new rules in the formula, Salas’ practice flourishes. Her solo exhibition Domino Gold, featuring the woodblock prints, showed at Canberra Contemporary At Space at the end of December 2017 and early 2018. From there a selection was chosen by painter and friend Vivienne Binns for inclusion in Binns’ March 2018 exhibition It is what it is what it is in Melbourne. Simultaneously, new works were sent to Sydney for the group show Straight Outta Canberra, curated byt Alexander Boynes. In late 2018 Salas will have works feature in an ‘expanded painting’ exhibition at Canberra’s School of Art and Design Gallery.

The accessibility and flexibility of printmaking Salas demonstrats in her work is deeply appealing. After all, these are traits that can be easily forgotten in certain tracts of the field. For the painter, print processes provide discipline and an order of operation - all welcome boundaries to push within. At every point, Salas’ careful and calculated image structure is belied by her works’ uncontainable irresistible vivacity and electricity, mesmeric whoops and furls.