Meena Hasan’s Etchings: The Line and Moon Spit
''Although I’ve tried etching in the past, this was my first opportunity to collaborate with a master printer, and one as skilled as the brilliant Derin. I travelled from NYC and we had just two weeks to work and rework the copper plates, moving through a period of trial and error towards two completed editions. We printed in the warm company of many studio cats and the brilliant artist Romina Meriç, who coordinated and offered invaluable insights throughout the process. Derin guided me in exploring soft ground, aquatint, soap ground, sugar lift, chine-collé and spit bite. It was a joy to collaborate and play together; we tried many different methods of transformation to discover a range of effects in intaglio.
The image in “The Line” is one I am deeply fond of. I first made it in 2009 and over the years it continues to transform iteratively often at major junctures in my life. Each time it teaches me so much. I see the tiger as a symbol of Bengal, where my family originates from. It is also a character, an alter ego and a spiritual entity. The tiger is not just a mask; it is emerging from, containing, cascading onto, covering and releasing the figure all at once. It is like fabric but also a hallucinatory vision; I like to play with the boundary between the physical: the known, exterior and tactile, and the non-physical, that which is interior and imagined in the mind.
We used chine-collé to add a textured Japanese paper in the background, bringing this print in direct relation to my paintings, which are also often on textured paper and also explore yellow’s complex transparencies. The paper’s all-over pattern makes porous the distinction between figure and ground, a painterly metaphor for the psychosomatic conditions of being a person in the world. I am a born and raised New Yorker and am drawn to textures that feel like the hustle, bustle and roughness of the city; I was thrilled to find this texture in Istanbul too. Making this print while crossing continents daily allowed me to further explore issues central to my practice, of specific locality within broader global and diasporic systems, of navigating the near and far.
I struggled with how to make the image self-aware of its physical objecthood. I wanted to temper the sentimentality of the image and keep it from being just an illustration. The last marks I made are the larger repeating lines punctuating and measuring the plate’s two sides. I scratched them directly into the already etched plate using dry-point and applying a lot of pressure. It took some courage to so dramatically intervene into the precious image that was already there; I had to destroy it in order to create something new, as happens often in nature. With these lines, the whole plate became the torso of a body with a rib cage. They marked a resolution, where the formal qualities started to find equal footing with the narrative image.
The next day, I was running along the Sea of Marmara while listening to D’Angelo’s vital album, “Voodoo”, thinking about our print, and especially these lines, through the rhythm of my steps. I’ve played this album repeatedly since D’angleo’s untimely death a few weeks ago, may he rest in peace. This was the first time I realized that track four is titled, “The Line”, and he sings about putting it on the line, taking risks, stepping forward and being present. The serendipity of this connection was too good to ignore, and so the title of the print became, “The Line”.
The second edition, “Moon Spit” is a spit-bite print, a process I had never tried before that Derin generously set me up to experiment with. I painted with acid directly onto the aquatint, making automatic, intuitive marks that resemble a woman, legs, hands, birds, water droplets, stars and the moon. To me, this figure is a night-time watery shadow of the day-time sunlit earthy tiger woman. She is basking in moon light, bending like the curve of the moon, towards and with the tiger woman.
I painted slowly and watched the acid make bubbles and craters; the texture of its alchemical reactions was like a spitty tongue inside your mouth and also what I imagine the surface of the moon might look like. I was thrilled to have arrived at another moment where the image exists both internally inside the body and externally in the universe. The composition was formed through the process of digestion; the acid turned green, oxidizing the copper and literally eating and biting into it, like spit. The material process made the image; it was a beautiful culminating collaboration between Derin, me and the medium of intaglio. These days with Derin taught me invaluable lessons about time, place, chance, care and dedication, only some of which are shared here, and I am eternally thankful.
With much love and gratitude, ''
Meena