All Yours, Mine Too (2024)

EXCERPT FROM:

CREATING SPACE: REPRESENTATIONS & ABSTRACTIONS OF LIVED SPACE (CARTER HELMANDOLLAR, 2024)

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CASE STUDY IN ABSTRACT SPATIAL PORTRAITS:

All Yours, Mine Too 

 

All Yours, Mine Too (2024) is a set of six separate intaglio etchings—one large, five small—that encapsulates the conclusion of the research presented here, as well as that of my studio work over the course of my MFA research. The prints were created using four zinc matrixes, engraved and etched with a composition of cubes. They mark, for me, the successful completion of the abstract side of the representation-abstraction axis that I set out to define for myself. 

 

The development of this series was a long road that pulled from many parts of my existing practice which initially seemed quite separated from one another. It really is only in reflection that I am able to recognize the throughlines that came together to form this work. Before I had conceived of the cube-based installation of Bedroom Portraits, I was stuck in my internal conflict with abstraction. I remember feeling frustrated with wanting to reach towards that world while, at the same time, feeling like I lacked the tools to do so authentically. I was still very much stuck in a limited conception of the abstract as something necessarily organic, this overtly emotional or stereotypically contemporary expression marked by seemingly random or fluid marks. My attempts at forcing myself into this kind of abstraction resulted in artificial replications of this false idea that were all uninspired and uninteresting to me. Random scribbles that meant nothing. I stepped back a little bit from the abstraction challenge I had laid out for myself and decided to sit with this discomfort while working on developing some different ideas.

 

Around the same time, I took a trip home to Virginia for the holidays. While I was there I was actively on the hunt for inspiration and was taking a lot of photographs, thinking about finding some references for different projects that I wanted to start once I returned to Rome. At New Year’s, I was at my parent’s house on the Rappahannock River and on the way up from the dock to the house, I saw a stack of crab traps that my dad or maybe one of my brothers had left by the stairs after pulling them out of the water for winter. An important thing about me—and bear with me here, this becomes very relevant, I promise—is that my family are East Coast U.S.A. Water People, through and through. My mom grew up swimming and water-skiing on the lakes of New England with her dad, fly-fishing in the rivers of the Shenandoah valley with her college roommates. She maintains her own prolific oyster bed float and by far tops the family in number of fish caught from the dock. My dad, a wildlife biologist specializing in wetlands and fisheries, was raised in the rivers and bays of Virginia and Maryland and he made sure his children were too. His father, my grandfather, taught me and my brothers all the best ways to catch fish and crabs; I have to admit that the two of them have retained that information much better than I have. I got my license to drive a boat long before I got a license to drive a car and I can’t remember a summer of my life (except for this one) that wasn’t at least partially spent on the muddy shores of the Chesapeake Bay. All of this is to say: although there might not be many others who feel the same, crab traps are very sentimental objects to me. They remind me of my grandparent’s old dock and hours spent at a table covered in brown paper while everyone picks tiny pieces of meat out of crabs covered in Old Bay seasoning. They remind me of the joy in my dad’s face when he finally had a dock of his own, a reason to buy his own traps. They remind me of the muscle memory of throwing a trap in the water and pulling it back up that all of my family members share. They remind me of home. I saw the crab traps—uncomplicated cubes of multicolored chicken wire and bungee cords—stacked up on top of one another on the shore and I stopped. I put all the stuff I was carrying with me down, took out my phone, and took 20 pictures.

 

When I was back in Rome, an ocean away from my home and back to struggling with the question of abstraction, I remembered this moment. I had been trying to sketch, to arrive at something useful, but kept coming up short until the memory occurred to me. It wasn’t a big eureka moment, but it gave me some direction. I started doodling, mostly thinking I was continuing to waste time, and tried to see if I could draw the structure of the trap from memory. This was a familiar object I had used so many times in my life and the structures of it were simple enough. My first attempt put the bait pocket on the wrong side, the hatch to the chamber where the crabs get stuck now obstructed incorrectly. I started again. I tried to walk through the memory, the process of loading the bait, how the crab would enter to eat, why the structure didn’t allow it to get back out again, and the part that opened for you to get the crab out. Success. It was a small victory and looking at the sketch—messy alongside ink splatters and test lines for a pen that kept running out of ink—the structure resonated. It sat sturdily in space, clean and simple, totally complete. So I committed to this as a legitimate line of thought. I started thinking more about the pictures I had taken, the effect stacking had on the overall visual experience of them. The crosshatching called to me and it was easy to imagine as a print. I completely lost time, so at ease with the repetition of lines, the easy logic of the space, the meditative tedium of the task. This was a process, to me, of encoding a memory just like in my bedroom drawings. It was an angle of abstracted space that I could get behind. By the time I finished that first sketch, I knew a major shift had taken place—I had stumbled upon something that would keep me busy for the next several months and, honestly, there is plenty more to do. 

 

So how did this sketch arrive at All Yours, Mine Too? The progression of the idea is fairly linear. I continued my many (many) sketches of the traps which usually turned into just boxes. I started to consider larger projects, more complex applications of the concept. I knew the idea would be well-suited to etching. Simplifying slightly, that process involved taking a thin piece of zinc, covering it in wax, carving marks into it with a sharp point which not only exposed zinc as wax was removed, but also engraved the marks into the metal plate itself. After engraving the full design, you can then submerge the entire plate in acid. The exposed zinc will be eaten away creating a deeper, clear mark while the covered zinc remains unetched. You can play with the strength and duration of the acid, as well as the technique of the mark, to achieve any manner of effect on the plate. The plate can then be inked and run through a press to create a final print. 

 

As I considered this process, I wanted to commit to a large print. I decided that instead of doing a single matrix with a single design, I would use multiple plates that fit together to make up a primary composition, but could then also be separated and printed in a variety of different orientations to create many more layered compositions. I decided to commit to the solitary cube, instead of staying true to the crab trap reference. But I did continue with the idea of stacking—of pressing individual units of space up against one another, overlapping and layering them. The eventual title, All Yours, Mine Too, which I did not come up with until the total completion of the printing process, references this sentiment. Extrapolating to a larger discourse of space and the installation approach of Bedroom Portraits, the cubes in this series become easy metaphors for the space of a house or room or body constantly existing around and within larger spaces. Each of us is made up of, creates, and exists within any number of spaces. The many spaces represented by the boxes are all your spaces, and they are also my spaces too.

 

After I established my design and made the plates, I had four rectangular zinc matrixes. I then, thinking about the embossing that would be left from the edge of the plate, cut the plates with a metal guillotine from their original rectangular dimensions into unique polygons. This would further complicate and engage the layers of overlapping lines. More space created. When it came to printing the plates, I filled a 60 x 90 centimeter sheet of paper using the four plates. The main composition made up of all four aligned together went in the center, then I further developed the composition by continuing to layer prints of the matrices. The planning and execution of this task was extensive given the size of the paper and the varied arrangement of plates requiring many separate inking and printing sessions. Once I had solidified that first big print, I realized I wanted to expand the scale, to make the project a series of prints rather than a single print. I decided on the long, thin dimensions to be able to use the plates in as many orientations as possible, playing off the echo of shapes. I planned the smaller prints, thinking of what combinations of the four designs were possible given the edges of the matrixes and how they would look alongside one another. I wanted to create a flow of shapes that would carry across the negative space that would exist in between the prints. 

 

I was able to install All Yours, Mine Too in a group exhibition, Unstable Realities, at the MAXXI: the National Museum of Art of the 21st Century in Rome in June 2024. With this project, I was able to summarize how I had carved out a comfortable place for myself in abstraction—one I could claim fully as my own. But these etchings were far from the extent of the exploration that led to that new-found declaration. The crab traps and the pictures I took of them facilitated this transition across mediums. I was able to apply the photos to the process of photopolymer printmaking, another challenge as a method of direct depiction that led to the exploration of the true extent of these images. I manipulated the images digitally, made at least a dozen matrices directly from or based on the content of their design, printed them in more colors and arrangements than I can count, and then manipulated them again physically, cutting them apart and rearranging them into collages. You can find versions of them on the cover of this book and at the start of each section. These images were creatively rich in a way I could not have anticipated.

In the reflection and analysis of this work after its completion, not only All Yours, Mine Too, but all the derivatives of the crab traps, I am able to very clearly see the connection to my work in Bedroom Portraits. Despite the seemingly drastic shift in aesthetic approach, this collection of work, too, mediates a relationship between the interior and exterior expressions of space, between the personal and the logical. Not only is there this basis in such a sentimental object, one distinctly related to the concept of home, but there is also the simplification of space that relates strongly with the house and the room. Over the course of its creation and the continuation of my more in-depth research on the topic of space, I was able to find many connections to an expression of space I had naturally arrived at; references to “the cube” and “the box” permeate literature on space, time, and art. There was also this exciting discovery of the abstract in a method that felt anything but forced. This approach felt authentic and deeply connected to not only my work, but also my self. I see, in All Yours, Mine Too, the conclusion of one phase of research, but also the significant beginning of another. I have the opportunity to embrace these new findings and synthesize them more fully. The possible iterations and growth potential of this concept spread out in my imagination to cover years of research and the continued expansion of my artistic practice. Here is both the drive and capability to create infinitely more space.