“You will never know how happy I am.”

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Residency, Leicester Print Workshop 2022–2024

 

Suzanne Balkanyi was born in Budapest in 1922. In 1947, she moved to Paris, where she studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. For many years, she worked as a zoological illustrator at the Paris Zoo. Shortly before her death in 2005, she is recorded as saying: “No one will ever know how happy I have been.” I was invited by Leicester Print Workshop to undertake a residency to create a series of prints using the bequeathed etching plates. The thematic focus of my work has been to explore ideas of loss, memorialisation, and the act of honouring what has gone before, while producing an extended and reiterated body of work. My intention was to work with Balkanyi’s etching plates in order to extend images made between the 1950s and 1970s into new contemporary etchings with different meanings and narratives. By this, I mean creating new works without desecrating the original plates on which her images already exist. I sought to examine the possibilities of producing a series of images that meditate on absence, loss, and the revisiting of objects that already carry their own history. At first, I questioned how I might approach the plates when I saw them. They seemed too full of figurative stories, where could I begin? Homage, memoriam, reiteration became the guiding concepts. I gradually stopped looking at the imagery on the plates and began focusing instead on the lines themselves. Printmakers are often preoccupied with lines. For etchers, the plate is built entirely from them, and we ask technical questions: Will these lines hold ink? Are they deep enough? But beyond technique lies another question, what do lines mean? I began selecting lines, many of them and thought about them deeply. The plates themselves seemed to pose questions to me: What if I added to Suzanne’s lines? What if I disrupted them? What if I placed new lines alongside hers? Our lines, hers and mine, were made in different countries, in different times, and from different lineages. Yet here they meet, intersecting through memory, dialogue, and continuation.

All prints are for sale

These prints are not editioned, they are unique prints. Only the one you buy will exist. These are original prints that are not reproduced in any other form. The prints are made on fabriano rosaspina within 50cmx70cm. Price £300 unframed.

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