Wild & Precious

Opening Reception: Friday Nov 14, 6-9
Closing Reception: Friday Dec 5, 6-9pm
at Alpaca Gallery

Katrina Noble is a professional book designer and artist. Born in Rhode Island, she has never lived in any city for longer than 9 years, and as a result has had the opportunity to experience many different parts of the country. She began experimenting with printmaking in 2015, but it wasn’t until she moved to Albuquerque from Seattle in 2023 that she has been able to focus on reduction linocut printing. 

I have spent the majority of my adult life in big cities, enjoying the anonymity afforded to a single person in a dense collection of humanity. I’ve always loved walking, and am drawn to quiet observation. The wonderful thing about walking through a city is that there is so much living happening in a relatively small area, and you can see so much of the human drama playing out on every city block. In my years of city walking, I’ve frequently stumbled upon little tableaus of existence—each one like the first sentence of a story. I keep my eyes open for them just as I would on a hike in the backcountry, looking for pika or elk or a squirrel-shredded pinecone. Humans leave a lot of ourselves lying around, and we dismiss most of it as garbage. I see it as something else: the human tendency to decorate our surroundings with evidence of our existence. It’s just what we do. I took pictures of many of these little scenes, just as they were, because they amused me or made me wonder. I filed them away for later. 

I was drawn to the reduction linocut process for a similar reason: it’s an exploration that you have to move through before you can fully see what it is. In this process, you carve the same linoleum block layer after layer, printing the entire run with each color until you are left with only the shadows and darkest accents. The colors combine on the print as you go. And then you’re done, and you can’t go back. When I became enamored with this printmaking method, I immediately thought of all the photos I had squirreled away and wondered if I could translate them into this medium. How would a pile of Taco Bell hot sauce packets on the wet curb look, as a linocut? Or a dumpster full of pillows in midtown Manhattan? After I got started, I felt that obsession creep in, when you can feel the pull of a whole field of what you don’t know yet. I liked the ephemeral nature of the subject and the process, and how together they felt like a new discovery.  ​