(Pre-Order) MHK Local Artist Series - Luke Townsend
Limited run MHK Local Artist Series tee. Each shirt purchased gets you an entry into a giveaway for one of Luke’s cyanotype prints - details below.
Hand-silkscreened front print
Premium quality Comfort Colors relaxed fit heavyweight tee in Light Blue or Pink. (100% ring spun cotton)
Percentage of proceeds go to support the collaborating artist. Pre-order period runs through 2/29/24. All orders will be printed and shipped after pre-order period has ended, around the beginning of March. Any orders containing a pre-order item will ship after all pre-order items are ready.
While this photograph of my Kansas Morel #2 has gone through many iterations, the process of printing cyanotypes began simply as a mitigatory response to an overwhelming amount of digital creation and the realization that the majority of work I’ll create during this lifetime will be at the mercy of fruitless binary composition - quickly drowned out, forgotten, in the wake of dwindling attention spans, and an increasing addiction for nonsensical digital dopamine. Perhaps an ironic attempt to evade impermanence, I missed the process of exploration, getting dirty, and creating an artwork by hand - work where the image is embedded into the fibers of the paper, a physical entity outlasting a digital sequence of 1’s and 0’s - work you can touch, hold, feel, and smell - work where each print is a unique, handcrafted one of a kind.
Fungi not only upend the prevailing binary concept of nature, they are connected through vast networks of mycelium threads, structured in a complex labyrinthine web. There’s poetry in that connection, each thread a musician in a symphony, no one less important than the other.
It’s precisely this connection that I wanted to explore with this series. This little mushroom has been a consistent thread in my life and opened the doors to countless friendships and inspiration, serving as a reminder that everyone and everything is a result of a set of causes and conditions, all of which influence our lives and work in one way or another. The power of community comes in the collective and following artist Mary Gordon in this series provides a perfect opportunity to highlight and appreciate the continued influence of others in your own work, a concept I’d like to see more of, and was inspired by the first artwork of Mary’s I received many years ago; a collage of Morel mushrooms. The visual metaphor appears here in the geometric dome of the Morel cap, mimicking the same interwoven structure of Mary’s playground artwork. While we enter and exit this lifetime alone, we can choose to live together right now…the music’s simply better when the symphony’s in union.
-Luke Townsend
Print to be given away is an an 8x10” Cyanotype print on 11x14” Canson Aquarelle 300gsm. Print will be signed, sealed, and dated.
This cyanotype print was made using the same chemical formula invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel as a way of reproducing his notes and drawings, which later became known as “blue prints.” The paper is hand-coated with an iron-rich sensitizer solution, a negative is placed on top and exposed to UV light, creating ferric ferrocyanide - the dreamy, monochromatic characteristics known only to the cyanotype process, aka: Prussian Blue. Every print is a unique, one-of-a-kind artwork.
