She’s worked as a forestry technician in Haida Gwaii, a medical radiographer in Singapore and a teacher and guidance counsellor in Hong Kong. But Kerri Orser has always been an artist, and most recently garnering attention for her linocut prints. One was featured in the latest issue of the international magazine Pressing Matters: Celebrating Modern Printmaking.
“The print that I made for the magazine was an Instagram online challenge. So every issue, they have an open challenge with a theme,” she explains, adding the prompt was black and pink.
“The subject is my family. We were visiting Japan and went to an izakaya restaurant, one of those tiny little restaurants [that] was known for its horse sashimi,” says Orser with a laugh, adding that the print is based off a photograph that she took in the restaurant.
“We were only there in Tokyo for three days, and my family was refusing to cooperate for photographs. So many photos of kids with their mouths hanging open… So I think I have about 20 photographs of that restaurant, trying to get a good one. And I was like, wow, that one’s actually not bad.”
“With printmaking in general, it’s less immediate than painting. With painting you see exactly what you’re getting, the same with drawing. But with printmaking, you don’t really know what you’re gonna get until you actually print it. And there’s something that’s exciting about it, the element of surprise and experimentation,” she says.
“I like that you can make multiple copies, and then you can experiment with the copies — print on different surfaces, use different layers, and things like that. Right now, and in Hong Kong, I had barely any space to work, so it’s something that you can do in quite a contained space and isn’t something that you have to complete all at once.”
The piece submitted to Pressing Matters was created as a reduction print, says Orser, which means the artist carves as they go, printing each colour in successive layers before carving more, so that particular piece had a limited print run.
Because her work and aesthetic interests are so eclectic, Orser is uncertain about how it would be presented in galleries. As there have been many requests for her prints she is considering getting into selling them online.
“I probably have about 20 projects on the go, and there is no theme. They’re all different. Some floral, I do have a lot of my family, I like birds, I like abstract. There’s so much. I don’t usually go for landscapes, but I actually do sometimes.
“A lot of my work is based on photographs that I’ve taken. But I do have a lot of abstract stuff,” she says with a laugh. “Part of my curse is I have so many interests. I just like learning, and I love to learn about everything.”
