By Avery Quinn
Alithea O’Dell, creator of Anchorless Prints, is a 36 year-old letterpress printer and printmaker and student graduating from Evergreen this spring. We had a socially-distanced, masked conversation in her open-air garage workspace, while her close friend Kim diligently worked in the background.
What led you to Evergreen?
Before I went back to school I had a lot of jobs that were either creative or project management but I wasn’t doing a lot of artistic stuff. I worked as a visual merchandiser, I did windows, I was a wedding and event planner where I did flowers and cool installations. I have always enjoyed visual arts but didn’t feel like I was an artist. I really loved printmaking and letterpress. I learned how to screen print in high school but didn’t pick it up. When I was in my very early twenties I started getting more acquainted with letterpress and I just thought it was a really wonderful process; it’s very romantic to see the print presses going. At the time I lived in Seattle and the opportunities to learn letterpress printing were few and far between and expensive. I just learned everything that I could about letterpress printing before touching a press. About five years ago I rebooted my life and moved back down here which is where I grew up. I decided to study letterpress and printmaking because I had nothing left to lose. And at the time my plan was to get a degree and get an admin job for the state because they only want you to have a four year degree and they don’t care what it’s in. I was like ‘tight, four-year degree in printmaking!’ I really wanted stability, I didn’t expect to necessarily be good at it or think of it as a career. But by the time that I got to Evergreen, within about three months that had changed and I was like ‘I never want to work a desk job again.’
Evergreen does that.
It does. And also, when I went back to school at Evergreen, because I grew up in Olympia and my mom went to Evergreen, my dad went to Evergreen, my sister went to Evergreen, I am very familiar with the school. I have seen so many people dedicate their higher education time to Evergreen and then not really know what to do after that. We’re in kind of a small town, there’s not a ton of industry here, you can work a service job for the rest of your life and be fine, but I went back to school to get stability and to have—just more stability that I’ve never had before. So when I started at Evergreen I made this conscious decision to start building a network as wide as I could throw a net. I have done residencies in Baltimore, I went to Penland (School of Craft) in North Carolina, I’ve done stuff with the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. I have gone out of my way to build a creative community that is far beyond Olympia so that when I do graduate I’m already on a lot of peoples radar. Because the likelihood of finding long term success in Olympia if I hadn’t done that would be very small. I looked at my time going back to Evergreen as an opportunity to live out all of these dreams and do all this cool s— that I would not have been able to do if I wasn’t in school.
It sounds like having that time before to do all that other stuff was really important to being able to come to Evergreen and know what you want to get out of it.
Evergreen is a great exploratory college. But I think that it does its best work for people who know what they want. And I can like hear Kim laughing because I am a Capricorn. But I have spent fifteen years as a working adult feeling pretty listless and not really tethered to anything, knowing that I wasn’t succeeding in a way that was meaningful for me. This was an opportunity more than anything else, nobody is telling me that I have to go to school, I know that I don’t have to have a college degree to have a career. I was like, ‘I’m going to take out loans, I’m not going to work full time. I’m going to maximize this as the wonderful opportunity that it is.’
When did you start at Evergreen?
I started in fall of 2018. Before going to Evergreen, knowing that there were some hard skills that I wanted, I spent three quarters at SPSCC. I took some advanced writing classes and a bunch of math classes because I wanted to get better at these things in a way that was very direct and contained, which is not what Evergreen offers. That was the best choice that I could have made, SPSCC is a wonderful college with a lot of incredible professors who totally don’t have to teach at a community college but choose to. It means that I’ve never struggled with how to write a bibliography or something like that.
That’s really impactful. More directly about your art, and your inspiration, it seems like you have a wide variety of prints that you make.
I do. When I was at Evergreen—physically, in the before times, I did a lot more traditional printmaking. When we went into lockdown I did not know when I was going to have access to the school again, I did not have a press. Letterpress is not a thing you can do in your kitchen. You need a lot of space. I don’t like the narrative of ‘someone made the best out of a bad situation,’ because that’s a little too boot-strappy for me. What happened was a perfect storm of terrible things that left me with a little bit of a windfall of cash, as far as a stimulus and financial aid and a refund from Penland, where I was supposed to spend ten weeks but we got sent home. I had saved up all this money, so I got it back. I decided to buy a press and try to establish something that was one-hundred percent reliable.
I’ve always loved greeting cards for a couple different reasons. One, I love any sort of office supply thing just as a micro-serotonin spark. It’s so interesting to be able to look at these consumable items that are created for the most part to create or affirm an emotional connection. I really love independently made greeting cards that are kind of funny and weird. When you think about Hallmark greeting cards they use this term ‘universal specificity’ which is basically ‘how do we write a thing that’s going to resonate with the most people.’ I think about specific specificity, unique specificity, creating things that don’t necessarily resonate with everyone but do resonate with some people in a way that is really affirming. I think that’s an amazing thing that can be made in this really interesting, unique craft way, and then exchanged between two people. There is a fair amount of research about how people look to greeting cards because they say something that they feel they couldn’t say on their own. There is an opportunity to push the dialogue about emotional connection in a format that is familiar to people. A greeting card is not uncomfortable to buy or receive; you understand the cultural exchange that is happening in that moment. I just leaned really hard into it. The other side of that is there are a lot of really wonderful printmaking processes that can take place using this press. So I’m able to do more theoretical work also. I’m kind of a process nerd, I like pushing what the thing can do. Because I’m printing a ton of greeting cards and I’m really familiar with all the things that my press can do, I’m able to do more elaborate and interesting print work.
I’d love to hear more about the theoretical side of your work.
What I’m working on now is sort of a pop-art Vanitas series of prints. The Dutch still life motif, where they use these very symbolic images of maybe a candle that’s blown out and a skull or rotting fruit or a lot of things that cohesively tell a story. I’ve always loved those paintings. I also knew, from working with flowers as a wedding planner, when you have a big order of flowers together, if they start to rot it radiates out. What rots near you will also rot you, which is reflected in more sociological ideas like where you grow up and what that creates as far as income stability, access to different opportunities, those environmental things. Also thinking about generational trauma and how delicate people are. Then there is this other layer of thinking about subscribed femininity and tenderness. Thinking about the differences between prescribed femininity and subscribed femininity. I’m loving images of flowers as these really delicate things that are affected by so much. That’s the more theoretical stuff—it’s kind of muddy. Dutch still life paintings are really detailed, they’re really big and they’re very dark. My take on that is individual items and they’re very bright, it’s much more pop-art-y, but still telling this overarching story of these ideas of rot and resilience and storytelling. It’s funny because even though these things are very different as far as greeting cards and this, the common thread is an affirmation of experience and an acknowledgment of a shared history. It’s a very intentional decision for me to work in a way where I’m creating many items because it’s an opportunity to make art as inclusive as possible as far as who can and cannot own art.
What would you like people to know?
We sort of touched on it. I had a great advantage to know what Evergreen would and would not offer to me. Looking at it as an opportunity to do these things that cost money that I would not otherwise have is one of the best decisions that I have made. It has meant that I am pretty fearlessly secure in the thing that I am doing. Thinking of Evergreen as an opportunity to really spread your wings is something that I highly recommend.
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