The Thistle
Relief prints: The appeal of the physical nature of the cutting action and of working with resistant materials to produce hard-edged and sometimes fractured lines can be a more dynamic activity than using a pencil or a paint brush. In the relief process, cut lines produce the negative (white) which are gouged out of the solid mass (black). Sasa likes exploring this expressive language in a dialogue between the positive and negative, representation and abstraction, control and accident. Her large woodcut images are hand burnished from sheets of plywood onto Japanese papers, using a wooden spoon to offset oil based ink. Woodcut is the oldest form of printmaking and still seems relevant today because of its immediate effects.