Kristina Key USA (1993), received her BFA in studio art from Appalachian State University, USA, in 2014. She has completed two residencies at Vermont Studio Center and has interned with the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and the Zea Mays Printmaking Workshop. Key was recently a student artist-in-residence at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art in Wroclaw, Poland. She is currently starting her third and final year of graduate school at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA, pursing a Masters degree in printmaking.
Kristina is the first of the artists to attend this year with the grant that the electrolithic workshop-residence offer annually to two artists under thirty years of age who are post-graduates in Fine Arts in the speciality of etching.
Energy, and relaxed concentration, are the attitudes that this young artist brings to her practice of electro-etching. She is open to the new experiences that this technique offers, has been surprised and fascinated at the results obtained with this non-toxic etching style and its countless possibilities and processes. She has practised etching lines with acrylic varnishes and BIG red ground, open bite electrotint with graphite ink varnish and BIG red. She worked on the semi-dry electrolytic etching process, taking advantage of the graphic results offered by the two plates required to perform the process, a technique that interested her immensely as she explains in her own (read below). You can see the two prints on this page. She also worked galvanized lines and passive electro-etching on a zinc plate to get deep bites for embossing and Roll-up prints.
Kristina Key is an artist with a promising career, and I am sure that her experience with electro-etching during this residence will help her to make progress with non-toxic etching processes in the future.
Pictures from the workshop
Kristina Key speaks about her experience in the workshop-residency
This residency has been such an incredible experience, I truly feel like it has changed the way I will etch plates for the rest of my life. Having a one-on-one learning experience with Alfonso Crujera at his beautiful studio overlooking the ocean, mountains, and banana trees couldn’t be any more inspiring. Alfonso is a wonderful teacher who is also very excited to learn from his residents, which shows how open and excited he is about this way of working and how it will continue to progress as it becomes a more popular way of working!
The electro-etching process was even more promising than I expected. Not only was I able to get a clean, consistent line etch on both copper and zinc, but the numerous other ways of working plates created such a broad range of experimental and surprising results that I see this way of working as the future of printmaking. I was particularly enamored by the semi-dry process of electro-etching, allowing for me to create a collagraph-like copper etching using a variety of materials. The thing that thrills me the most about electro-etching is how health and environmentally conscious it is. As a printmaker who is constantly seeking out more nontoxic ways of working, this is the best!
Alfonso welcomed me into his studio with kindness and a never-ending supply of patience, while also welcoming me into his home as part of his family for my two-week stay. Alfonso, Amparo, Helios, Sara, Nehru, and of course their pup, Okra, were an absolute joy to be around.
I would recommend this residency to any artist with a passion for printmaking and experimentation!
Kristina Key's electro-etchings
